The passing of Oul-i-but and other tales

THE PASSING
)F OUL-I-BUT

;co

ALAN SULLIVAN

THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT

AND OTHER TALES

For a moment there was

a silence as of death

THE

PASSING / OUL-I-BUT

AND OTHER TALES

by ALAN SULLIVAN

1 9 * 3

LONDON AND TORONTO
J. M. DENT fcf SONS, LIMITED

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON fcf CO.

AS-

610082

TO

MY WIFE

The Author desires to thank the Editors of
The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine,
Scribner's Magazine, and Messrs Street
& Smith, for their courtesy in permitting
the use of several of the following stories.

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT i

PILOTS OF THE NIGHT . . . .29

THE ESSENCE OF A MAN . . . .47

THE HOUSE INVISIBLE . . . .65

THE TRAINING OF CHILIQUI . . . .79

THE LAST PATROI. . 95

PLUS AND MINUS . . . 1 1 1

THE CYCLE OF THE NORTH . . . .127

THE REVENGE OF PINN£ .... 137
THE TURNING POINT . . . .165

THE MANITOU MAIL . . . .195

CONSECRATED GROUND . . . .217

THE BUSH FIRE ..... 241
THE DEFIANCE OF NA-QUAPE . . .253

THE YOUNGER SON ..... 269
THE DEATH SONG OF CHILIQUI . . . 287

THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT

From Baffin Land to Barrow Strait

The level ice-fields go,
From Boothia Gulf to Minto Head

The great bergs journey slow ;
By ridge and shore, by cape and bay,

By reefs the whalers shun,
The bear and coast wolf seek their prey

Where the blind sea ways run.

League upon league of frozen death

The trackless barrens lie,
Speechless beneath the north wind's breath

And the shimmering Jlame on high ;
Where, rank on rank, the cold green fires

Blazon the purple night,
And the grounded icebergs lifted spires

Are steeped in ghostly light.

The small brown people dwell within

Their carven igloo homes,
Till the lost sun returns to melt

The dark and rounded domes;
And again the bearded walrus dips

Beneath the drifting jftoe,
A nd the sleek gray seal affrighted slips

From his bed upon the snow.

THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT

Chan-tie, the Curlew, sat on a rock near the
end of Great Bear Point and gazed blankly
north at the Arctic Ocean. Spring had not
yet weakened the chill manacles of that rock-
bound coast, and the heavy ice stretched from
her very feet, but Chan-tie's expression reflected
nothing of the light of the strengthening sun.

She turned her broad fat face to her mother :
" Aule-lik-tahai, let us start," she said slowly.

But Kug-yi-yuk, the Swan, was old, also she
was comfortable, also she was busy making the
master of all Husky fish-hooks. One set of
lean brown sinewy fingers held a glistening
fish bone, three inches long, and the other set
ceaselessly twisted a needle-pointed flint into
one end of it. She bent over it, twisting and
screwing, till the flint point poked through,
then she looked at Chan-tie with a grunt of
satisfaction. " It is good, but I am a fool ! "

4 THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT

Chan-tie's face expressed nothing: "Why?"
she said, lazily.

The old woman's eyes peered out across the
level ice. Half a mile from shore a lumpy line
of hummocks broke its crystalline surface, and,
behind these, out of sight of the caribou that
walked out to sun themselves, lifted a clump
of dome-like mounds. From the height on
which they sat, a brownish yellow figure could
be seen ; it crept slowly from one dome to
another, then stooped and disappeared. Kug-
yi-yuk pointed :

"That is why," she said, with a tinge of
regret at her own words, "Oul-i-but lost two
yesterday, and, see, I make him another.''

She leaned back, and behind the film over
her glazed eyes there moved something memorial
and tender. It did not seem so long ago, that
time when Oul-i-but had stalked into the women's
quarters, and put his hand on her shoulder and
said "Come." She had come, willingly and
with not a little pride, for Oul-i-but was the
strongest man and the best hunter of the tribe,
and she had never ^regretted it. Now — even

THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT 5

as the fish-hooks had dropped from his palsied
fingers into the green abyss below — her mind
sank into the depths of an unwonted reflection.

The sun drooped slowly, but her busy hands
stayed not, whatever her thoughts. She rounded
the jagged hole and pushed another bone nearly
through it, pointing upward till the two made
a V with the one leg shorter than the other,
then she lashed the angle firmly with sinew, and
punched another hole for the line. "It is
finished," she said sharply, " Pi-huk-tuk, let us
go home."

They clambered carefully down the smooth
rocks, and, once on the level ice, Chan-tie looked
curiously at her mother, " What is it," she
ventured, " Will he go ? "

Kug-yi-yuk's leathern face sharpened into a
grim despair, "Yes — my daughter, he will go."

There was no one about in the camp when they
reached it. A few lean, sharp-nosed, bushy-
tailed dogs smelt at them, but, scenting no
meat, set off to look for game of their own.
The older woman stopped at the tunnel that
led into the largest igloo, and crawled in on

6 THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT

her knees, Chan-tie following. Within, the light
spread dimly, revealing a blackened dome pierced
by a small square hole through which a spot of
sky looked strangely blue. Over against the
wall an old man lay on a deer-skin and stared
at them with blank eyes. In the middle of the
igloo a hole was cut, and the clean, green water
lipped its dirty edge ; around and against the
circular wall the floor was raised, and here fur
robes and greasy deer-skin clothing lay in heaps.

Kug-yi-yuk stooped over the old man. His
face was drawn like parchment, and the cheek
bones stood out sharp and white. uOul-i-but
is hungry," she said softly.

Her husband raised himself slowly and lifted
his dim eyes to her own, " I will eat now," he
whispered weakly, " and then eat no more ! "

"It is the end," wailed Kug-yi-yuk, throwing
herself face down beside him.

Oul-i-but looked at her for a moment, his
features like a mask, and turned to Chan-tie.
"You have heard," he said dominantly, "I
would eat."

Chan-tie returned his stare, but there was

THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT 7

wonder and terror in her own, then she picked
up a copper knife. Its blade was long and of
the yellow metal that lies in lumps on the shore
of Victoria Land, and its haft, a dull brown wood,
was teak, from the bones of a vanished British
ship.

Her father followed every movement, for
Chan-tie was slow and did things with a dull
deliberation, but Oul-i-but had reasons for not
being in a hurry. She hacked a piece of ice,
fresh water ice, from the blackened walls of
the igloo, punched a hole in it and put a wooden
skewer through the hole. Then she found a
shallow stone lamp, of the shape that was used
on the hills of Thrace two thousand years before,
and into the lamp put a handful of moss, and
over the moss poured seal oil. Then with
flint, steel and touchwood from her fire bag,
and a few short vigorous strokes, and a careful
puffing of round fat cheeks, the oil rippled into
a yellow white flame. Lastly, she put the lamp
nearly under the piece of ice that swung on
the skewer in the wall, and watched it drip
slowly into a pan.

8 THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT

All of this Oul-i-but saw, and, tottering to the
hole took Kug-yi-yuk's fish hook in his trembling
fingers and with weak skilfulness fastened it to
a long line of twisted sinew. The end of this
he passed over a forked-stick and attached it to
a string of dew-claws that quivered and sounded
with the slightest motion. He sat motionless.
Behind him lay Kug-yi-yuk in a heaving heap,
and, in front, Chan-tie held out blubber and a
bowl of water, but Oul-i-but moved not.

An hour passed. Outside, the noises of camp
came faintly, dogs barked and men called — and
then— suddenly the string of dew-claws trembled
and tinkled. Oul-i-but snatched at the taut line
and pulled nervously, and it came in through his
lean fingers till below, in the green depths, the
lithe shape of a salmon flashed at the end of
his quivering line. Then, as the water heaved,
the old arms tired. Instantly the great fish
plunged, the hook parted, and the sinew lay slack
in Oul-i-but's grasp.

He peered at the line and pressed it between
his bony finger-tips. Kug-yi-yuk had lifted her
head and stared at him from the floor, Chan-tie's

THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT 9

eyes, big with wonder and fear, were fixed on
him. He stood up very gently, drew in the
line and laid it in a coil at his feet : " Bring
Nun-ok," he said slowly, "I would see Nun-ok."

At the words Kug-yi-yuk wailed anew and
crawled to her husband's feet, " Wait, Oul-i-but,
wait. Not now."

But Oul-i-but only said wearily, "I am very
tired, and I must go," and motioned to Chan-tie
who got down on her knees and crawled shapeless
into daylight. Then there was silence in the
igloo save for the old woman's sobs, and over
the lamp the ice dripped slowly into the bowl,
and strange shadows of Oul-i-but's figure were
thrown on the curving wall, till Nun-ok, the
Bear — the son-in-law of Oul-i-but, shuffled in.
He was short and broad, and the black hair lay
sleek in a straight line above his beady black
eyes. He knew what was coming, so waited
till the old voice sounded again.

" Oul-i-but is weary. I would go as a chief
of my tribe, and, since I have many years, I will
go to-morrow."

Nun-ok's heart stirred within him. Thirty

10 THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT

years ago, Oul-i-but had taken him hunting.
In mid-winter he had taught him to fish, and
whiled away the long darkness with tales and
ancient legends of the Arctic. In the spring
he used to guide him to the sleeping walrus
and stand between the lad and a quick death
in green water. In the summer, when the bands
of caribou does came north to drop their young,
it was Oul-i-but who saw that the boy fleshed
his long copper knife, and so, through all the
seasons of danger and ease, of plenty and of
hunger, Oul-i-but walked beside Nun-ok till
manhood came to the young hunter and he took
Chan-tie to wife.

Nun-ok had seen much of death — he had lived
on the narrow edge of it for years, and many old
men had departed on the way that Oul-i-but would
go. So he did not mind that so much, but it also
meant that the tribe would have to move, and this
was regrettable, for, opposite where the grey rocks
came down to the rim of the land, there was a
cliflF, and beyond the cliff a flat expanse over which
one could drive the caribou to their plunging
destruction. Therefore he knew that this summer

THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT 11

he would not see the fat, grey, tumbling deer drop
smashing on to the pointed rocks, as they had
the summer before. But also remembering many
things he looked long and understandingly at
Oul-i-but till he caught the old man's eyes, and
in them brooded the mystical shadow of mortality.
So with full leadership pending over him, Nun-ok
drew himself up as becomes a leader, and said,
"To-morrow my father shall go as a chief
goes."

The women watched Oul-i-but for a time after
Nun-ok departed, for there was something in the
finality of the men's speech that had answered all
their questionings. He no longer seemed ancient
and helpless, for was he not a wise traveller about
to take the most wonderful journey of all. In the
season of the year, drifting ice-fields, carefully
chosen, were used to carry the tribes to their
hunting and fishing grounds. That was a long
journey and a slow one. But Oul-i-but, brave
chief, was going on a still longer journey to still
better hunting-grounds, and never before was he
so sure of the journey's end. The peoples that
suck at the paps of a fruitful earth are not thereby

12 THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT

rendered brave and tender, but rather those, who,
in the stark and iron-bound wilderness, wage an
endless war against danger and famine. So it was
that his kin turned with love to Oul-i-but. There
was no more place for tears or lament, his going
was settled and honour should attend him. Nun-ok
the Bear, passed the word to Aiv-ik the Walrus,
and Tuk-tu the Caribou, and from the naming of
these men it may be seen that they were hunters
all. They met as the Arctic night came down,
and, ere the shimmering Aurora had reached its
zenith, the last igloo of Oul-i-but took form.
Twenty feet in diameter the base blocks circled,
and Nun-ok stood inside, deftly locking them
together as they rose with diminishing sweep.

Soon the white dome was out of reach, and he
cut a block of his own and stood on it, while
Aiv-ik and Tuk-tu swung their long knives
beneath the ripples of red, and yellow and green
that spilled out of the wonderful arch of flame
overhead. There was no waste of time or energy
as the igloo rounded and closed its perfect curve.
Then Nun-ok cut a six-inch square hole in the
middle of the roof, hewed his way out at the

THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT 13

floor line, builded the exit and the tunnel, and, on
top, stuck a gleaming walrus tusk, that all men
might know that this was the house of death.

With the grey of dawn a whisper ran through
the camp, and, ere morning came, the great igloo
was seen, a little way apart, broad and high, with
the walrus tusk glinting on its top. Then they
all knew, and Oul-i-but himself tottered over and
scanned it as closely as his dim eyes might, and,
feeling the slow curve of its rising walls, his soul
was glad, for, in his memory, no chief had gone
away in so big an igloo as that. So he went
slowly back and told Kug-yi-yuk and Chan-tie
that all was well, and asked for the things that he
had made, and found and treasured all his life.

The hearts of the women, having put away
their weeping, were charged with a great desire
to serve this wayfarer, and they brought, first, his
copper knife and the short spear with the steel
head that bit through the walrus hide and sank
deep, while the haft shot up to the surface
through troubled waters. Also his long steel
knife that he got from the Englishman who
sought the end of the earth, even though

14 THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT

Oul-i-but told him that only death lived there ;
and he had seen the Englishman once again, after
blowing the snow off his face as he lay in the
place of death. Then Kug-yi-yuk found his flint
that came from Lind Island where Victoria Strait
turns north to the ocean, and the steel and finger
ring that the captain of a whaler had given him
for a white bearskin.

All these things were placed beside the old
man, and the women ransacked far corners and
brought out new caribou robes, a fishing line and
hooks, and a lamp ; all new and fit for the use of
the departing chief; and his fingers were
trembling among them when Nun-ok thrust in his
broad shoulders. "It is ready, my father."

Oul-i-but climbed to his feet, and, for a space,
turned his eyes slowly to all parts of the igloo.
Nun-ok and the women were silent and motionless,
while, for a long time, the old man stood with
lips parted in an inaudible whisper of farewell
to his home. He stooped and won painfully into
daylight. At the mouth of every mound grey
figures stood watching his fated steps, and the
wolfish dogs crouched without a quiver, their

THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT 15

jaws gaping like spots of crimson picked out with
glistening fangs. On one side lifted the black
cliffs, and, to the north, the level ice blinked
league after league to the place of death that the
Englishman had found.

So he passed through the watching tribe to his
last home, and Chan-tie and Kug-yi-yuk spread the
robes and others brought food ; deer meat from
the last great hunt of last summer, and walrus
flesh of the day before, and long strips of soft,
delicate blubber; fish stiffened in the frost, and
leaves of the tea muskeg that they had got from
Yellow Knife Indians near the Bay. The hunting
had been good all winter and the traveller was
glad of it ; for, when one is going to the best
country of all, it is much more comfortable to
leave one's tribe in a state of happiness and
plenty than in misery and want.

Then his friends trooped in with kindly words,
trooped in till the place was carpeted with small,
round, brown men, whose quick narrow eyes
swung restlessly from Oul-i-but to the meat. So
the feasting began, and they ate as do those who
need neither fire nor water for existence,

16 THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT

He watched them — these friends, tried and
true. He did not touch flesh. His figure was
tense and rigid, his eyes more blind than ever, but
within moved memories, stirred into life by this
parting feast and the faces around him. The
women had gone, for this was man's business, and
Kug-yi-yuk's devotion was at an end. Thus the
hours passed till the eating ceased and the gaze of
his guests turned toward him, and all fear and
regret and doubt fell away ; for the gods of the
silent places had spoken to Oul-i-but.

"Unwak, the night has come for me," he said,
slowly rising and surveying them with uncertain
vision, "and I have asked you to come and eat,
that I may say good-bye. I go on a long journey,
but at the end will be your friends and mine, who
have gone already. But before I go, I would
speak of myself that you may remember Oul-i-but,
the Shining Ice, that was so long your chief."

Nun-ok, still sucking at a strip of blubber,
got up ; but Oul-i-but waved him down. " The
time will be when you will do all the speaking
even as I do now."

The ring of copper-coloured faces swung

THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT 17

toward Nun-ok and, as the beady eyes glanced
sidewise at him, the whites of them shone
lustrous between their narrow lids. A little
murmur, half amused, half indignant, ran through
the igloo, then Oul-i-but's tired old voice
creaked on:

ult is well that you should remember that
I was your chief — that I made this tribe brave
and strong." He hesitated a moment, and then
shouted weakly, " Who was your greatest
hunter ? "

The brown men swayed as they sat, and
called back "Oul-i-but,"

" Who was your strongest man ? "

Again the echo thundered, " Oul-i-but was
the strongest."

"And now who was the bravest ? "

" Oul-i-but," the answer came, but not so
certainly as before.

The old man peered from face to face and
said bitterly, " Will any come with me on my
long journey ? "

A hush fell in the igloo. It was as if the
black-eyed men were suddenly petrified, and in

18 THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT

the silence could be heard the women's voices
outside, calling to the dogs. Oul-i-but's thin lips
lifted, showing the rusty teeth and shrunken
gums within. "Now — who was the bravest
man?"

The still circle twitched into life and the black
eyes gleamed. " Oul-i-but," they answered, and
this time with no uncertainty.

" I have told you that I am going to see our
friends. They will ask about you. What shall
I say to your first wife, Aiv-ik ? " A grin flashed
from man to man. Aiv-ik was troubled, but they
knew he must answer. He dared not send
word that this second one was either better
or worse than the first ; he feared trouble at
home as much as he did angering a spirit.

"There is nothing to tell," he said sulkily.
"I will wait and carry the word myself."

Oul-i-but nodded wisely. "And for my part
I will say nothing save what you would have
her know. There is a word, however, for your-
self ere I go. I bid you change your throwing
of the spear. It is well to remember that from
your kayack two spears' length is enough. On

THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT 19

the ice the foot tells when it is firmly placed,
but you throw from your kayack as from
strong ice."

Aiv-ik, not a little angered, got up quickly ;
but a growl rippled round the silent circle, and
Oul-i-but turned to Nun-ok and his trembling
arms went about the man's broad shoulders.

"My son will be a great chief and the tribe
will grow strong and follow where he leads,
and I would speak because you are the new
chief. It is easy to go first, and the paddle
is like a duck's feather in your hands, and the
kayack sings under you when you kill the fat
black seals. And it is easy to be wise and
brave when the caribou cover the plains like
moss, and the salmon and trout feed in the
shallow water. All this I have seen long ago
before you were children, and my heart is
weary with remembering. But when the ice
closes up tight, and Un-orri the north wind
blows, then the caribou go south to the land
of little sticks, and the sky is no longer dark
with the goose and the swan and the big grey
ducks. The walrus moves slowly along the

20 THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT

bottom of the sea, and only his nose is beyond
the water of his blow-hole when he comes up
to breathe. Nun-ok, the bear, walks abroad,
and he also seeks food, while the she-bear
lives and starves beneath the banks of snow
that she may bring forth her young. Then also
come hunger and the sickness that takes men
in their sleep, and then it is that you must
remember that you are a chief."

"Even as my father," said Nun-ok, looking
at him steadfastly.

The bent figure straightened, and a glimmer
lit the fading eyes. "You have spoken. Not
till you give yourself for the tribe will you have
the heart of a chief."

Nun-ok stooped and fingered the string of
dew-claws that lay with the rest of the traveller's
gear. "Tell us of these before you go," he
said thoughtfully, swinging them into a tinkling
rhythm.

The quiet circle leaned forward, imperceptibly
closing in. The black eyes grew blacker and
brighter, like little sparks of diamond flame in
which glittered the lust and fury of the chase.

THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT 21

And into the frenzy of their thoughts dropped
Oul-i-but's voice, old, cracked, and weak, but
broken and burning with the memory of that
great hunt.

"It was a long time ago, before my people
came down the narrow water that leads to the
big sea where there are no holes in the ice.
It was the middle of the winter, and the rest
was as I have told you — famine and sickness.
Un-orri blew for many days and the ice was
thick, and a great white bear came and walked
round our igloos and we could see his footmarks
at the doors, for he too was very hungry. So,
on the third day, the father of Aiv-ik and the
father of Tuk-tu went out to kill him, for I
was very sick and could not hold my spear. All
that day we waited, but they came not, nor
heard we any noise of man or bear. So, in
the morning of the fourth day, the mother of
Tuk-tu, being very hungry was also brave, and
walked out to see, and came to a big hummock
that was north of the camp. There she saw
the father of Aiv-ik and the father of Tuk-tu
lying with their faces in the snow and their shirts

22 THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT

torn and bloody, and between them sat the bear,
biting at the point of a spear that stuck out
of his side. The bear looked, but did not move,
and kept on biting at his wound; and she ran
very quickly and told me."

Here Oul-i-but's voice rose and grew louder
and stronger, and cast away all semblance of age
or weakness or the death that awaited him. " I
spoke to the spirits and told them that my tribe
had need of me, and asked them to take away my
sickness and give me strength again. Even as I
spoke the strength came, and I rose up, and my
back and knees and arms were well again, and I
bent my spear with my hands, which no other man
has done or can do. So I went to meet the bear."

"He saw me," the old voice rang on, "and he
was still biting at his wound ; so I called : ' I
have come to kill you, and I will give your skull
to the dogs.' Still he did not move, so 1 said :
' It is a rat and no bear that I see ; ' and then he
looked at me, and the blood of my friends was on
his breast and head. He was very big and thin,
and his eyes were small and red. He came very
fast, and I put the butt of my spear in a little hole

THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT 23

in the ice, pointing the blade at the blood on his
chest, and when he turned to strike my side I
turned also the spear and he ran on it, till it went
into his breast as far as my arm is long. So
the spear broke in his body, and I struck with my
dag till he died with his mouth open to slay me."

The passion died in the old man's tones, the
force of them dwindling as he went slowly on.
"We drew him to the igloos, also the fathers of
Tuk-tu and Aiv-ik, and the tribe ate the bear and
I gave his skull to the dogs."

" And my father ? " said Aiv-ik.

" And mine ? " put in Tuk-tu.

" The tribe was large " whispered Oul-i-but
painfully, for his strength was going fast. "Also
it was very hungry. We killed no more for many
days — but we ate not their spirits, which I shall
soon see."

Tuk-tu and Aiv-ik regarded each other silently.
It was true — he could not have eaten their
spirits.

There fell a hush, and the brown men looked at
Oul-i-but. Beneath them, almost imperceptible
tremors palpitated through the ice, as the blind

24 THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT

tides set in toward the land, and, even as they
looked, the weight of his years fell on the old man
and he grew immeasurably aged. None of them
spoke for they knew what would come next.

Then, faint and trembling, he said, "I go
before, but we shall meet again. I am old and
very weak, but where I go there is food and rest
and happiness. Remember me, for I am very
weary and would say good-bye."

The nearest man rose, put his hands on the
traveller's shoulders, kissed him on mouth and
brows, and, stooping, crawled out of the igloo,
and, after him, came another and another, kissing
the dim eyes, caressing the bent figure, till there
was only Nun-ok left. And last, the new chief
held the old one closely to him for a moment, gazing
earnestly into the withered face, expressing cour-
age, affection, hope, and farewell — all these in a
mute understanding way. Then he looked about
and saw that the remnants of food were properly
placed, that the fishing line was in order, that the
deerskin robes were dry and comfortable.

Now the moment had come when Oul-i-but
should not see any more of earth, and Nun-ok

THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT 25

caressed him for the very last time. " I will re-
member, my father," he whispered, with his arms
around the old man's neck, then he, too, stooped
and disappeared. The traveller stared at the
mouth of the tunnel. It threw a patch of reflected
light that spread with soft radiance in this fine
new igloo of his. Then the patch changed and
lessened, and the igloo grew darker; and soon
it took strange irregular forms and vanished
altogether, till he looked up and caught the
pin-point of a star through the six-inch hole
overhead.

Nun-ok had crawled out into the centre of a
little crowd, and, since a chief must serve a chief,
he had silently placed the blocks that sealed the
igloo for ever. Also he found that the women had
packed the tribe's possessions in sledges, had
harnessed the dogs, and men and women alike
waited his command.

The Arctic day had dwindled, and in the north
flashed the first banners of a great Aurora.
Whatever of darkness there was, seemed luminous,
and away southward, to east and west, loomed
the black cliffs of Great Bear Point. There were

26 THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT

no shadows of a storm, and the ice lay before them
clean and hard.

Now the spirit of a chief is one worthy of
reverence. It was, therefore, the custom of the
little brown men to travel for a day and a night in
order that it might not be hurt or soiled in its
passage by sound or sight of mortals. Further-
more, since the weight of their life bore heavily on
them, and distress and hunger were brothers to all,
it was written that one hungered or in danger
might use the igloo of death. He must, however,
make sure that the spirit was gone, and then the
robes, the flint and steel, and all that was there
might be used with reverence and care. If he had
wherewith to pay, he should pay, but, if not, he
should bless the spirit and depart, leaving all
things in order.

At a sign from Nun-ok they drew off a little on
the first step of their journey, then the sledges
and the little people halted in an irregular curve,
their faces toward the igloo. For a moment there
was a silence as of death. The great Aurora
blossomed into a fiery spray and rippled into a
marvellous riot of life, beside which the winking

THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT 27

stars looked pale and thin. Gusty waves of colour
trembled through it from end to end, while it
shot forth spears and arrows and battalions of
light, that seemed to drown and engulf everything
in the purple sky. The tribe saw it, but noted
not, save that it spoke of troubled weather; they
were waiting for a sign, and presently the sign
came.

Nun-ok raised his hand, and there floated across
the stark ice to Oul-i-but the farewell call of his
people. It was the cry of those who face danger
to one who has fought his last fight, the voice of
the fear and courage and mystery and love that
broods in the hearts of the men of the far north,
and it rang sharp and clear up toward the stars,
and it drifted into the igloo of Oul-i-but. -'Good-
bye," they called. "We shall meet again.
Good-bye, Oul-i-but, good-bye."

The old man raised his head at the sound of it,
for he was still watching the place on the floor
where the patch of light had died. These were
the last voices he should hear on earth. For a
little time he would mark the trembling of the ice
and the press of the north wind past his igloo.

28 THE PASSING OF OUL-I-BUT

He would catch a few fish, and eat and rest, and
then he would go to sleep, and not notice anything
any more till he woke up in the far country among
his old friends. But this last call must be answered,
so, with effort and failing strength he climbed on
Nun-ok's block and put his mouth as near as he
might to the hole in the roof, and sent out his
soul in one last word to his people.

Faintly it lifted, for the end was not far away.
Still fainter it came down the wind, where waited
the black-eyed fur-clad men, while the black-
nosed bushy-tailed dogs lay on the snow and bit
at the ice between their toes. At the sound of it,
they called again, more clearly, more strongly, and
then stood motionless for the answer.

But all they heard was Un-orri, the North
Wind, talking to himself, as he came down from
the land of the white death.

PILOTS OF THE NIGHT

Billy the driver, is sitting aloft, with a face like a hot cross bun,
And his overalls are spotted 'with grease and his eyes are

rimmed with grime,

But he's pulled a couple of hundred souls and maybe a thousand ton
Through the muck of a long midwinter night, and the
Limited is on time : —

You let !

The Limited is on time.

Sitting alone with a smile on his face, and, say, looking down at you,
And wondering whether you know or care or ever will

understand

What it means to handle a thousand ton in a fog as sticky as glue,
With a slippery rail and a tricky valve and a damnably leaky
gland : —

That's what !

A damnably leaky gland.

So he rams ajlnger into his pipe and slow to the yard he wins,
To herd the bulk of his big machine where the rest of the

bullgines are,
To join himself to a gruff-voiced group, where fellows with square

cut chins

Drop in from their long harangues with death and chasing the
morning star : —

Well, yes!

From chasing the morning star.

PILOTS OF THE NIGHT

ELECTRIC locomotive No. 4032 slid quietly out
of the darkness and cushioned gently against the
coupler of the forward baggage car of No. 26.
She was low, flat, and black, a crouching double-
nosed monster. She gave you the impression that
the faster she went the closer she would lie to
the rail — which, indeed, was very much the case.
There was nothing of the lofty, dignified, and
somewhat supercilious locomotive appearance about
her. She had no stack, no rods, no cylinders, no
tender. She was sheared and shorn, naked and
unashamed. She carried no coal and no water,
and her entrails were of carbon and copper and
steel.

From the cab window I looked back along the
shining Pullmans. They were swallowing their
nightly freight of unimpressionable inhabitants.
It seemed strange that not one of them even
glanced forward to the business end of the train.

31

m PILOTS OF THE NIGHT

" Do they never come up here ? " I asked
Cassin, the engineman, whose elbow touched my
own.

"The ladies bring the children, sometimes.
See the pretty engine," he added quizzically.
Then, with a swift glance at an illuminated
dial, "Sit over there, we're pulling out."

Far back, opposite the middle of the train, a
blue-coated man raised his arm. Cassin pushed
his controller handle delicately forward, with
little fractional movements. On the instant, vivid
flashes of blue flame ripped out in narrow passages
that ran each way from the cab. I had a glimpse
of interlocking contacts that gripped and spurted
fire and released one another. From beneath our
feet rose the grumble of the driving-gears.

The locomotive weighed one hundred tons,
and the train weighed eight hundred, but No.
4032 laid her long, black nose between the rails
and pulled till one expected her straining bowels
to burst asunder. It seemed an eternity till the
tumult subsided. It was hard to believe that
this mechanical frenzy was born in the whirring
dynamos at Yonkers ; that it came, docile along

PILOTS OF THE NIGHT 33

its aerial filaments, to animate this inflexible
demon. Within a coach length the skidding
drivers bit hard on the clean rail and we rolled
smoothly into the tunnel. The great tube
stretched ahead like a gleaming causeway. And,
just as our ears began to throb with the weight
of the trembling atmosphere, we boomed out into
the night and the million windows of New York
stared at us, Argus-eyed. But Cassin was not
interested in New York. His left hand was on
the controller. There were little straightenings
and contractions of the arm, swift glances at his
quivering dials, and a steady, relentless staring
ahead at a myriad of signals, green on green,
red on red, green and red in every possible
combination and position. These were his
masters, these his voiceless arbiters ; and, just
as I was wondering how any one pair of eyes,
however keen, could interpret them, I became con-
scious that his helper was staring as fixedly forward.
"All right," said Cassin. "All right," said
his helper. It was not one brain, but two, that
were at work ; and all through the night, on
each successive division, it was the same, this
c

34 PILOTS OF THE NIGHT

sharp cross-fire of "All right " across the heaving
iron floor.

New York from the smoking compartment and
New York from the engine cab are two
different cities. One is interesting, imposing, and
picturesque. The other is vital, compelling, and
intensely human. You are an onlooker in one
case, and a participator in the other. A partici-
pator, in virtue of the fact that you are beginning
to see things as they are, your eyes are being
opened to what men of one kind expect from
men of another. Should this appear enigmatic,
the reason may be evident before you climb out
of the cab at Buffalo.

Across the Harlem we swayed through locked
switches till the northerly ridge of Manhattan
Island curved its brilliant back above the polo
grounds. Then, almost beneath the reverberating
arches of High Bridge, No. 4032 slipped away
into the darkness with a smooth, contented purring
of her motors. She had pulled us out of the
city. That was her limit, and she would shortly
pull in a Pittsburg flyer. She was metropolitan.
She paralleled Broadway.

PILOTS OF THE NIGHT 35

The night was cold, and No. 4017 was
festooned with little wreaths of steam that clung
to her gigantic outline as she backed noiselessly
out of the gloom. Compared to the electric, she
was blatant and obvious, but hugely and magni-
ficently so. There were no technical mysteries
about her. Everything stood out sharply and
nakedly. And Harrington, her lord and master,
was, in face and form, just such a personality
as should rule this metallic kingdom. He was
big and loose-jointed, rosy -cheeked and blue-
eyed. There was the clean, strong line of face
and chin that betrays what the Scotch call a
"magerful" man. To see him start the ten
Pullmans was an education. He had all the
delicacy of touch of the trained horseman who
knows his horse. Little by little, taking and
giving, he laid his engine "to her work, and
beneath him the great machine responded with
long-drawn breath and a volcanic coughing of
smoke and vapour.

Under the tension of the start it seemed
impossible that a man-made contrivance could
withstand the strain. From front and rear came

36 PILOTS OF THE NIGHT

a thousand querulous voices, the individual com-
plaint of integral and burdened parts. They
revolted against stress and weight. But, as speed
increased, these gradually smoothed themselves
out into a cradle of interlinking sound and vibra-
tion. No. 4017 had got down to her work.
There was just a steady snore of hurtling
momentum, cushioned against the hum of the
swaying coaches behind.

Harrington sat motionless, leaning forward on
his right elbow, his left hand constantly grasping
the throttle. He was the brain and nerve centre
of the cab, but he contributed nothing to the
almost savage activity that possessed his fireman.
The latter moved swiftly. His left foot pressed
a flattened lever and the fire-doors yawned under
the force of compressed air. From within, small,
arrow-headed flames spat out and licked the rivet-
heads around the opening. Into the white heart
of the furnace swung the coal. Be it noted that
none was spilled, though the opening was but
three inches wider than the shovel — and this at
fifty miles an hour.

The fireman moved from the shovel to the

PILOTS OF THE NIGHT 37

injector, that sucked water from the tender into
the long, black barrel of the boiler ; from the
injector to the air-vent on the tank — for by now
No. 4017 was scooping a thousand gallons a
minute from a trough that lay gleaming a mile
long between the rails ; from the air-vent to cast
keen glances ahead where the green and red
signals hung in suspended clarity, and to shoot
back a sharp "all right" to the motionless man
in blue overalls. The train plunged deeper into
the night, and, as the glow of the fire-box
illuminated the great white plume of steam that
trailed from our lifting valves, the reflection of
this lithe figure was cast upward against its
fleecy surface. It was suspended over the
sleeping passengers, a vast shadowed and toiling
spirit, symbolical of those who labour in darkness
that others may slumber in safety.

All these things were so compelling, with a
certain dominant reiteration, that one was prone
to forget the ghostly country we traversed. At
Yonkers we flashed by the delicate masts of a
fleet of tenantless yachts. Sing Sing palpitated
with the brilliancy that streamed from its bare

38 PILOTS OF THE NIGHT

exterior galleries and the white expanse of its
incommunicable walls. Suddenly there glittered
an insistent, dazzling ray from the search-light of
a river steamer. Its beam flickered uncertainly
up and down the green shores opposite, till,
swinging with inconceivable rapidity, it poured
on us and flooded and followed us. The rest of
the world, signals and all, vanished utterly. Then
the ray lifted and leaped and dropped hawklike
on the hills again.

West Point slid past us in long lines of
ordered lights that dipped to the water's edge.
The great mass of Storm King shouldered
heavenward, and, hundreds of feet beneath us,
men delved in subterranean solitude, to bring
the springs of the mountain tops to the greatest
city of the New World.

Poughkeepsie and the high skeleton of its
bridge dropped behind. The fairy step-ladder
of the Otis inclined railway reared its jewelled
and tenuous length into the night and vanished.
Another element obtruded itself — time. One
could neither gauge nor approximate this. And
yet we had moved with precision; our varying

PILOTS OF THE NIGHT 39

speed had subordinated itself to stops and starts.
We were on time — that was felt. And, pondering
this, one became slowly conscious of the subjective
co-ordination, the human and mechanical alliance,
that controlled the safety of lives behind us, the
safety of average, particular, hard-to-please, apt-to-
complain travellers.

From Albany, another engine, with Hisgen at
the throttle, faced the steep ascent from the fat
river meadows to the Mohawk valley plains.
Hisgen showed what an engine would stand. He
was imperative and relentless. Here, more than
anywhere, one was conscious of the enormous
drag of the heavy train. The whole panting
framework expended itself it such effort as almost
drew pity for its gigantic struggles. The jump-
ing needle on the steam-gauge dropped a point.
The fireman swung his shovel more and more in-
cessantly. Then, just when it seemed that this
superhuman progress must end in ruin, the engine
found herself. The orchestra swung gradually
through the crescendo to an ultimate and mag-
nificent fortissimo. The grade was climbed. It
was the acme of co-operation, one that responded

40 PILOTS OF THE NIGHT

gallantly to a man in overalls, the passionless
director of this tempest of power.

At the top of the hill the repair shops glowed
with a green, unearthly light from Cooper Hewitt
lamps. We had a vision of swarms of ant-like
men attacking inert locomotives, amputating and
patching. Then these faded away in a sudden
fog that settled on the earth like a blanket.

Into it we raced blindly. I looked for the
wrinkles on Hisgen's sleeve, for these were the
only visible signs when he reduced speed. But
the arm moved not. He was staring forward.
The thick vapour penetrated the cab, striking cold
and damp. Then a glare sprang up directly
ahead. We plunged to meet it. In a fraction of
time No. 42 from Chicago swayed past in a blur
of velocity and fled roaring southward.

The fog lifted and revealed a long line of
dredges blazing with light and eating their way
through the flat loam fields. Here would shortly
be the Barge Canal, miles of it already constructed.
We passed them rapidly in a smooth run that laid
the miles contentedly behind, till steam was cut
off and we coasted luxuriously into Syracuse.

PILOTS OF THE NIGHT 41

And at Syracuse came Hoff, a veteran of the
road, whose rugged features softened into a wintry
smile at the sight of the third man in the cab.
An hour later it was seen what manner of driver
Hoff was.

The wind pressure was ramming into face and
eyes, searching them with a keen hardness that
spoke of speed. I looked inquiringly at the fire-
man, for, be it known, silence is something more
than golden on an engine. He raised five grimy
fingers twice. We were making nearly a mile a
minute.

Suddenly Hoff's left arm straightened in a pull,
and instantaneously I peered ahead. Low down,
near the track, was a spot of red, infinitely small
and distant ; it swung in a tiny arc across the rail.
HofF moved with an almost vicious certitude and
the air went on. Then, as the whirring drivers
bit at the cold steel beneath them, my mind
leaped to passengers ! Up to that moment they
had been remote — unreal.

But now the ponderous Pullmans closed up
and thrust us forward with inconceivable weight.
I had a vision of hundreds of unconscious forms

42 PILOTS OF THE NIGHT

relaxed in sleep — forms that swayed gently in
their gigantic cradle, oblivious of everything, and,
above all, of the supreme tension of that moment.
In this enormous effort there flashed on me the
gulf that yawned between them and the grim-
faced man who was still master of himself and his
machine. The red point grew and swung the
faster, and, just as HofF was reaching for the
reverse lever, we stopped dead beside it.

Nearly a thousand tons, nearly a mile a minute,
but bitted, bridled, and curbed in five hundred yards.

So much for nerve and mechanics, but mark
what followed. HofF leaned far out and spoke to
an invisible figure below. Then he drew in
sharply and coaxed the train into motion. His
face had changed and hardened. The two steel
pin-points into which his eyes had contracted grew
sharper. Not a word was said, but his jaw pro-
jected till it looked like the ram of a Dreadnought.

Later, I knew why. We had been flagged by
a brakeman who moved in the darkness on the
wrong track. He had held up the Limited. To
him it meant something more than a reprimand.
To HofF it meant sixty-five miles an hour till day-

PILOTS OF THE NIGHT 43

break. To me it meant a lesson of self-control.
There were no words wasted. In the breathless
period that followed I saw man and machine at
their uttermost, for Hoff took the very last pound
of steam that the boiler would give him. The
engine swayed horribly as she hit the curves,
swayed till it seemed she must plunge in ruin from
the delicate ribbons over which she thundered.
But Hoff sat inflexible, and, at daybreak, the
Limited was on time.

The dawn greeted us with a suggestion of widen-
ing horizon and a softening of the sharp outline of
signal lamps. It was not so much the spreading of
light as the hesitant withdrawal of gloom, beneath
whose dwindling skirts the light seemed to have
been always waiting. Then houses, trees, and
fences divested themselves of indistinctness.

Rochester loomed bare, black, and empty
beneath this pitiless revelation, but at Batavia the
morning had marched on to that humanizing period
when night yields up her sleepers. From the cab
window this vanguard of early workers looked
strangely individualistic on its way to factory and
forge. Is was as if we ourselves were completing

44 PILOTS OF THE NIGHT

a journey from some remote asteroid, and, after
countless questioning leagues of darkness, had
arrived, at last, on some more normal and firmly
established planet. And now that the straight
track stretched clear ahead to Buffalo, I longed
that the great army of travellers could have looked
into the cab of the Limited. All through the
night the belching fire-doors had painted two
figures with momentary and lurid life. The cold
stare of morning told another story. The fireman,
sheathed with grime, still swung his tireless shovel,
but there was a droop in his shoulders, a slackness
in his momentary rest that was eloquent. Hoff's
left hand still rested on the throttle it had never
deserted since we rolled out of the black abyss of
Syracuse station. But his face, stained ebony
with a million particles of coal-dust, was lined and
furrowed like that of one who bears great burdens.
For all his strength, and all his mastery, the run
had made its mark upon him.

The value of his human freight was perhaps a
million dollars, and it lay nightly in the hollow of
his hand. I groped for some understanding of
what a man gives who gives himself thus. The

PILOTS OF THE NIGHT 45

steady beam of that clear blue eye seemed to stand
for something higher and finer than money value.
It stood for the mental side of a marvellous
alliance. Civilization demanded transportation.
A mechanism was developed, enduring beyond
belief, refined to the last degree. And, moving in
parallel perfection, the human organism marched
with it, till the last conceivable quality of the one
linked .into responsive union with the other. That
was what Hoffand his brothers -stood for. Disci-
pline, courage, judgment, self-control. In evidence
of which — listen.

A few years ago the brakemen on a great
transcontinental system threatened to strike. The
traffic of thousands of miles and half a continent
was imperiled. The men demanded higher wages,
easier hours — in short, considerable betterment.
The company demurred. A total stoppage was
imminent when the general manager, wise beyond
most men, offered to arbitrate before — not a board
of lawyers or business men, but a board composed
of members of the Locomotive Drivers' Union.
The offer was accepted. The board adjudicated
fairly and squarely, and their decision abides to

46 PILOTS OF THE NIGHT

this day. That is why confidence is felt that the
railroads and their engineers will find themselves
able to solve their difficulties without a conflict.

Now turn the shield in the drama of the road.
All down the curtained aisles people were slowly
shaking off their sleep, drowsily wondering
whether they were on time. Porters were answer-
ing insistent bells. Every luxurious appointment
of the train found its use. Hie hotel on wheels
was alive again. Here and there, across dainty
tables, men discussed the disgraceful way in which
brakes were put on during early morning. It had
broken their dreams. Not a thought of the
business end of the train. Not a word of danger
or stress or endurance. Not a glimmer of the
bag vigil, or the tense brain, or the tireless hand
on the throttle. These travellers were playing
their self-appointed part — on the strength of
what ? A first-class ticket and berth between the
cities of New York and Buffalo.

At Buffalo HoflF leaned at the cab window, and
beside him I watched the departing travellers.
He looked down, immobile and toil-stained. They
did not look at Hoff. They took him for granted.

THE ESSENCE OF A MAN

By portage, pack and tumpline,

By mountain top and trail,
By creek and lake, by swamp and brake

7 he ancient laws prevail :
The hunter to his quarry

Shall come as night to day.
But, at the last, the fur is passed

Into the Hudson Bay :

The 'wolverine and otter

Full ponderously go,
The fox and mini light footed slink

Across the driven snow ;
But, through the ivinter 'weather,

Men know one right of 'way,
The trail that bends but lastly ends

Within the Hudson Bay :

Now since the life is bitter

And death is next of kin,
And perils 'wait without the gate

When cowards sleep 'within ;
" Let one deceive his neighbour "

" An outcast shall he stray,"
" We have no meat for thieves to eat"

Thus saith the Hudson Bay.

THE ESSENCE OF A MAN

THROUGH level lines of streaming snow, a huge
figure loomed large and portentous. Vanishing
in blinding gusts, it ever and ever appeared
again, thrusting itself onward with dogged per-
sistence. Across flat and frozen plains forged
the great piston-like legs, driving down his
snowshoes with a clocklike regularity that sug-
gested, rather than told of, enormous muscular
force. Behind him, knee-deep, toiled five yellow-
coated, black-muzzled dogs, their shoulders
jammed tight into their collars, their tawny
sides rippling with the play of straining tendons ;
and, last of all, a long, low toboggan lurched
indomitably on, the trampled trail breaking into
a surge of powdered snow under its curving
bow.

Into the teeth of the gale pushed this pigmy
caravan — a gale that was; born on the flat shores
of Hudson Bay, that breasted the slopes of the

40

50 THE ESSENCE OF A MAN

Height of Land, that raged across the blank
white expanse of Lac Seul, and was now shriek-
ing down, dire and desolate, to the ice-bound
and battlemented borders of Lake Superior.
It was a wind that had weight. Tom Moore
felt its vast and impalpable force, as he leaned
against it, when he stopped for breath. It
assaulted him — it tore steadily, relentlessly, at
him, as if seeking to devour — it lashed the
stinging grains into his face, and into the open
mouths of his panting dogs — it smoothed out
the crumpled trail as the wake of a ship is
obliterated by closing waters — till, a moment
after his passing, the snow ridges lay trackless
and unruffled. Still, however insignificant in
these formless wastes, that silent progress held
steadily on; and so it had held from early morn.
These black specks on a measureless counterpane,
guided by some unfailing instinct that lurked
far back in the big half-breed's brain, were
making an unswerving line for a wooded point
that thrust out a faint and purple finger, far
ahead in the gathering dusk. As they drew
slowly in, the wind began to abate its force, and

THE ESSENCE OF A MAN 51

Tom, peering out from the mass of ice that
was cemented to his mouth and eyes, looked
for some sheltering haven. The dogs smelled
the land, and more eagerly flung themselves into
the taut traces, while over them gathered the
shadows of the welcome woods.

Peter Anderson, the Hudson Bay factor at
Lac Seul, was low in provisions, and had sent
to the Ignace post a curt suggestion that the
deficiency be supplied ; and Tom Moore's laden
toboggan was the brief but practical answer to
his letter. The three-hundred-pound load was
made up of the bare necessities of life — pork,
flour, and the like ; these, delivered, would be
worth seventy-five cents a pound and thirty
dollars a sack respectively; and Tom was the
arbiter of transportation. In summer his canoe
thrust its delicate bows through the water-ways
that interlaced the two posts, and in winter his
snowshoes threaded the stark and frozen wilderness.
He had always travelled alone on the ice. Nature
had moulded him with such a titan frame, so huge
and powerful a body, so indomitable and fear-
less a soul, that he had become accustomed to

52 THE ESSENCE OF A MAN

laughing at the fate that overtook many of his
tribe. They disappeared every now and then,
utterly, silently, and mysteriously ; but ever Big
Tom moved on, the incarnation of force and of
life that mocked at death.

When, two days before, MacPherson had sum-
moned him to the Ignace post, and pointed to the
pile of provisions, and said laconically : " For
Anderson, at Lac Seul," Tom had merely grunted,
"How," and set out to harness his dogs. But
the last day had brought him more serious reflec-
tion. By the flight of the goose it was two
hundred miles and by the winter trail perhaps two
hundred and fifteen ; and of these forty now lay
behind him.

He made his camp, he lit his fire, he flung to
each ravenous dog a frozen whitefish, and ate,
himself, almost as sparingly ; then, rolled in his
rabbit-skin blanket, he lay down on his back, and
looked up at the winking stars.

About midnight the wind changed and veered
into the south-east, bringing with it a clammy
drizzle, half snow, half rain, that plastered the
trees with a transparent enamel, and spread over

THE ESSENCE OF A MAN 53

the surface of the earth a sheet of ice, half an
inch thick, and exceeding sharp.

In that shivering hour which heralds the dawn,
a branch cracked sharply a little distance from
the camp. One of the dogs twitched an ear,
and Tom was too deep in sleep to notice it.
The five huskies were buried in snow beneath
a tree, from a branch of which swung a sheaf
of rigid fish, suspended in the air for security.
But, in the half light, something moved, a some-
thing that turned upon the smouldering fire great
luminous eyes — globes that seemed to receive
the glow of dull coals, and give it out again in
a changing iridescence. Around the eyes was
a white-gray mask, crowned by short-black-
pointed ears ; behind the ears moved noiselessly
a tawny body, with heavy legs and broad, soft
pads. It slipped from tree to tree, touching the
ground lightly here and there, till the great lynx
hung, motionless and menacing, above the sleep-
ing camp. It stopped, sniffed the tainted air, and
then stared, fascinated, at the sheaf of fish, which
hung, slowly revolving, in tantalizing proximity.
Silently, with dainty and delicate caution, the lynx

54 THE ESSENCE OF A MAN

laid itself out on the branch, and, clinging tight,
stretched out a curved forepaw ; it just touched
its object, and set it swaying. Again the paw
went out, and again fell short. A quicker thrust,
and the big pads slipped on the frozen wood, and,
with a scream, the great cat fell fair on the sleep-
ing dogs.

In an instant the air split with a frenzy of noise.
Tom sprang up, and saw a maelstrom of yellow
forms, a convulsive, contorted mass, from which
came the vicious snap of locking jaws, the yelp of
agonized animals, and the short, coughing bark of
the lynx. Around and in and out they rolled,
buried in fur and snow. The wolf was born again
in the huskies, and, with all their primal ferocity,
they assailed each other and a common enemy.
Two of them crawled away, licking great wounds
from deadly claws ; and then gradually the battle
waned, till it died in a fugue of howls, and the
marauder escaped, torn and bleeding, into the
silence from which he came.

Tom stood helpless, and then, when the three
came limping home, went over to where his two
best dogs lay, licking great gashes — for the lynx

THE ESSENCE OF A MAN 55

had literally torn them open. As he approached,
they lifted their black lips, till the long fangs shone,
ivory white ; and death and defiance gurgled in
their throbbing throats. A glance told him that
nothing could be done ; the frost was already
nipping the raw flesh till they snapped at their own
vitals in desperation. He raised his axe, once,
twice — and his two best huskies lay on a blanket
of blood-stained snow, with twitching bodies and
glazing eyes.

Then, very soberly, he examined the others.
They were still fit for harness ; so, in the yellow
light that began to flood the world, he shortened
his traces, twisted his feet into his toe straps, and,
with never a look behind, faced again the burden
of the day.

The trail was hard to break. The crust, that
would not carry the dogs, was smashed down, and
tilted cakes of ice fell over on his shoes, a deck
load that made them a weariness to lift. Behind
floundered the toiling huskies, the leader's nose
glued to the tail of the trailing shoes. What vast
reserve of strength did man and beast then draw
upon, Tom could not have told you ; but, hour

56 THE ESSENCE OF A MAN

after hour, the small, indomitable train went on.
As the day lengthened, Tom shortened his stride ;
for the dogs were evidently giving out, and his
thigh muscles were burning like hot wires. At
four o'clock the team stopped dead, the leader
swaying in his tracks. The big half-breed, run-
ing his hands over the shaking body, suddenly
found one of them warm and wet — it was sticky
with blood. Then he saw blood on the trail ;
looking back, he saw crimson spots as far as the
eye could distinguish them; lifting the matted
hide, he revealed a gash from which oozed great,
slow drops. The valiant brute had drained his life
out in a gory baptism of that killing trail. Then
Tom sat down in dumb despair, took the lean
yellow head upon his knees, smoothed the tawny
fur back from those clouding eyes, and set his
teeth hard as the dying beast licked his caressing
hand in mute fidelity.

The great frame grew rigid as he watched, and *
slowly into the man's mind, for the first time in all
his life, came doubt. Perhaps it was more of
wonderment. It was not any suggestion of failing
powers, imminent danger, or impending hardships ;

THE ESSENCE OF A MAN 57

it was rather a mute questioning of things which
he had always heretofore accepted, as he did the
rising and sinking of the sun — things which began
and ended with the day. His reasonings were
slow and laborious ; his mind creaked, as it were,
with the effort — like an unused muscle, it responded
with difficulty. Then, finally, he saw it all.

Long ago, when his mother died, she had warned
him against the false new gods which the white
man had brought from the big sea water, and in
her old faith had turned her face to the wall of
her teepee. She had been buried in a tree top,
near a bend of the Albany River, where it turns
north from Nepigon and runs through the spruce
forests that slope down to Hudson's Bay. But
Tom had listened to the new story — more than
that, he had hewed square timber for the Mission
Church at Ignace ; and now — retribution had
come, at last. No sooner had the idea formulated
itself, than it seized upon him; and then there
rose to meet it — defiance. Grimly, he slackened
the collar from the dead husky, and laid the
empty traces across his own breast ; savagely he
thrust forward, and started the toboggan, and the

58 THE ESSENCE OF A MAN

diminished company stayed and stopped not till,
once again, the darkness came.

That night the two surviving dogs eyed him
furtively, when he flung them their food. They
did not devour it ravenously, as was their custom ;
but crouched, with the fish under their paws, and
followed, with shifting look, every move he made.
He was too weary to care ; but, had he watched
them an hour later, the sight would have con-
vinced him that there was an evil spirit abroad in
those frosty woods.

Noiselessly, they approached his sleeping form,
sniffing intently at everything in the camp. He
lay, massive and motionless, wrapped in an
immense rabbit-skin blanket, one fold of which
was thrown over the bag that held his pro-
visions ; his giant body was slack, relaxed, and
full of great weariness.

The dogs moved without a sound, till they
stood over the sleeping man. The long hair
rose in ridges along their spines, as they put
their noses to his robe, and sniffed at their
unconscious master ; for, whether it was the fight
with the lynx, or that yellow ' body out on the ice,

THE ESSENCE OF A MAN 59

some new and strange thing had come into their
blood ; they had reverted to the primal dog, and
no longer felt the burden of the collar or the
trace — the labour of the trail had passed from
them.

At first, the smell of man repelled them, but
it was only for a moment; their lean shoulders
swayed as their twitching noses ran over his out-
line, and then a new scent assailed them. It was
the provision bag. Gently, and with infinite
precaution, they pulled it. Tom stirred, but only
stirred. The sack was trailed out over the snow,
and the tough canvas soon gave way before those
murderous teeth. In silence, and in hunger, they
gorged ; what they could not eat was destroyed,
till, finally, with bulging sides, they lay down and
slept, in utter repletion.

It was the sun on his face that woke Tom
to a consciousness of what had happened. He
felt for the bag, and, finding it not, looked at
the dogs, and, on seeing them, raised his hand
in anger. Now, this was a mistake ; few dogs
will wait for punishment, least of all a half-
savage husky who expects it. He approached,

60 THE ESSENCE OF A MAN

they retreated ; he stopped, they squatted on
their haunches and eyed him suspiciously ; he
retreated, they did not move ; he held out a
fish, they were supremely indifferent. They had
entered a new world, which was none of his ;
they suddenly found that they did not have to
obey — and when man or beast reasons thus, it
spells ruin. All his arts were exhausted and
proved fruitless, and then Tom knew that an
evil spirit — a Wendigo — was on his trail.

To push forward was his first instinct. Slowly,
he rolled up the blanket, and laced it to the
toboggan ; and, as the sun topped the rim of the
land, the unconquerable breed struck out across
the ice, the traces tugging at his shoulders. A
few yards behind followed the enfranchized team,
drunk with the intoxication of their new-found
liberty. Never did he get within striking distance,
but ever he was conscious of those soft, padding
sounds ; he felt as if they were always about to
spring at his defenceless back, but all through
the weary day they followed, elusive, mysteriously
threatening.

He pulled up, faint with hunger, in mid-

THE ESSENCE OF A MAN 61

afternoon, and went into a thicket of cedar to
set rabbit snares ; but no sooner had he turned
than the dogs were at the toboggan. A ripping
of canvas caught his ear, and he rushed back in
fury. They fled at his approach, and lay, flat on
the snow, their heads between their paws ; so
Tom pulled up his load, built a fire beside it, and
watched the huskies till morning. He had now
one hundred miles to go; he had three hundred
pounds to pull, and no dogs; he could not, dare
not sleep ; and he had no food, but — Anderson
was waiting at Lac Seul.

Who can enter into those next days? Through
the storms — and they were many — moved a
gigantic figure, and, after it, crawled a long coffin-
like shape ; and behind the shape trotted two
wolfish forms, with lean flanks and ravenous
jaws. Across the crystalline plains plodded the
grim procession, and, at night, the red eye of a
camp fire flung its flickering gleam on those same
threatening forms, as they moved restlessly and
noiselessly about, watching and waiting, waiting
and watching. As his strength diminished with
the miles, Tom began to see strange things, and

62 THE ESSENCE OF A MAN

hear curious and pleasant sounds. Then he got
very sleepy ; the snow was just the colour of
the twenty-dollar blankets in the H. B. post ; it
was not cold now ; he experienced a delicious
langour ; and people began to talk all around
him ; only they wouldn't answer when he shouted
at them. Then the Wendigo came, and told him
to lie down and rest, and, as he was taking off
his shoes, another spirit called out :

"Kago, kago — nebowah neepah panemah."
("Don't, don't! You will find rest by and

by.")

At noon, on the eighth day after Tom left
Ignace post, Peter Anderson looked across the
drifts of Lac Seul, and shook his head. The
horizon was blotted out in a blizzard that whipped
the flakes into his face like needle points, and the
distance dissolved in a whirling view. The bush
had been cleared away around his buildings, and,
in the bare space, a mighty wind swooped and
shrieked. As he turned, the gale lifted for a
moment, and, infinitely remote, something appeared
to break the snow line at the end of a long white
lane of dancing wreaths ; then the storm closed

THE ESSENCE OF A MAN 63

down, and the vision was lost. Keenly, he
strained through half-closed lids; once more
something stirred, and, suddenly, the wind began
to slacken. In the heart of it was staggering
a giant shape, that swayed and tottered, but
doggedly, almost unconsciously, moved on into the
shelter of the land ; behind trailed a formless
mass, and, last of all, the apparitions of two lank,
limping dogs.

Drunkenly and unseeingly, but with blind,
indomitable purpose, the man won every agonizing
step. His snow-shoes were smashed to a shape-
less tangle of wood and sinew ; his face was
gaunt, patched with grey blots of frost-bite ; and,
through his sunken cheeks, the high bones stood
out like knuckles on a clenched fist. Ice was
plastered on his cap, and lay fringed on brow and
lids, but beneath them burned eyes that glowed
with dull fires, quenchless and abysmal. By
infinitesimal degrees he drew in, with not a wave
of the hand, not a sign of recognition. Up the
path, from shore to trading post, shouldered the
titan figure, till it reached the door. At the
latch, stiff, frozen fingers were fumbling, as

64 THE ESSENCE OF A MAN

Anderson flung it open ; and then a vast bulk
darkened the threshold, swung in helpless hesita-
tion for a fraction of time, and pitched, face
foremost, on the rough pine floor.

A few hours later, he looked up from the pile
of skins upon which Anderson had rolled him.
His eyes wandered to the figure of the trader,
who sat, serenely smoking, regarding with silent
satisfaction a small mountain of provisions.

"All here, boss?"

"Ay, Tom, all here, and I'm muckle obliged to
ye ; are ye hungry, Tom ? Will ye hae a bit sup ? "
" No eat for five days ; pull toboggan. No
dogs."

Anderson stiffened where he sat. u What's
that? Haulin' three hunder' of grub, and ye
were starving ? Ye big copper-coloured fule ! "

" No packer's grub, boss ; Hudson Bay grub ! "

It was almost a groan, for Tom was far spent.

Involuntarily the quiet Scot lifted his hands in
amazement, and then hurried into his kitchen,
murmuring, as he disappeared: "Man, man, it's
with the likes of ye that the Hudson Bay keeps
its word."

THE HOUSE INVISIBLE

Thus, smirking, spake one whom good fortune crowned ,

" Behold my mansion, my memorial trees
That, like green rivers, circle it around ;

My lambent gems from far-off nameless seas,
My canvases and ancient folios, bound

And wrought in virginal and sweet cloistered ease.
Gold, festal song, beauty and love and wine,
All of earth's tribute, all and all — are mine."

Strange, thai above his castle1 s granite tower

Should hang a phantom and deserted hall,
Where nothing stirred to life, and hour by hour

The dust of centuries settled on the wall,
Till painting, folio, and garden bower
Were sifted over with a breathless pah ;
A gulf of silence, so remote and deep
That death seemed nigh forgotten in its sleep.

THE HOUSE INVISIBLE

THE great plain stretched before me, vast and
untenanted, splashed with odorous flower spaces,
wrinkled and alive with the lift of morning winds.
To all these I had escaped at the bidding of a
new strange instinct, suggestive perhaps rather
than dominant, but impellent enough to thrust its
delicate pressure through the hardening crust of
my own self-approving personality. It was not
beauty that had brought me there. 1 sought
nothing that dwelt on the gemmed sod or in the
hollow caverns of the wind, nor was I conscious
that I evaded anything. A sudden spiritual
wander-lust was over me.

Nor had forgetfulness aught to offer. I had
borne my years bravely, and the world knew with
what measure of success ; something of honour
had been earned, and riches came with it. I had
not stooped to the unclean thing. I loved, and
was beloved. But, for all of this, I had become, in

67

68 THE HOUSE INVISIBLE

a flash, conscious that there was that I knew not
of, a deeper insight which I had never attained,
but which might perchance stoop to me, and so I
walked abroad in solitude, with every barrier of
time and circumstance dismantled.

I knew the plain, for it was my own. From
the mansion windows its spherical undulations
rippled out and lost themselves in the wideness of
that world against which it was a fragrant
barricade. In the midst of it the house reposed,
and, whatever winds blew, only the breath of
wild thyme and clover, of gorse and honeysuckle,
traversed the sentinel ranks of my memorial trees.
Southward lay the sea, to which the sweet land
leaned, and that way I walked.

But half-way between the mansion and the
shore I stopped on the brink of a cleft ravine
that stretched at my feet, and, most strangely,
however well I knew my land, I knew not this
ravine. Just as the mind stops, startled at
undreamed depths of thought, suddenly discovered,
so I halted at this rift that dipped sharply sea-
ward. It was, perhaps, half a mile wide and a
mile long. At the bottom was a tarn of still

THE HOUSE INVISIBLE 69

black water, ringed with a fringe of sand, and to
this the hillsides descended smoothly with green
encircling slopes. Opposite, within grey stone
boundaries, an old house faced the lake, and at
the sight I stared round-eyed, and turned till I
caught, in the blue distance, the comforting
mound of trees around my own mansion. For
this old, and yet new, house was indeed the
brother of my own in shape and size and propor-
tion, and it looked also as my own would look
should a hundred years of forgetful ness enshroud
it. Stone for stone, window for window, walk
for walk, but devoid of sound and life and any
breath of humanity, this strange place lay beneath
me, and, gazing, I heard its call.

Approaching the great iron gates, again the
replica of my own, I searched in vain for any late
intimate or humanising touch ; and, forcing them,
the rusty hinges creaked stiffly in the motionless
air. At once I knew, in some subjective fashion,
that I was no stranger here. Across the long,
straight garden walk, tangled rose bushes
enmeshed themselves into an interlacing network,
and there was that in the rose bushes, in the long

70 THE HOUSE INVISIBLE

walk, in the great gates, and, lastly, in the dead
walls facing me, that was eloquent of myself
alone. There was, there could be, no asking of
where or when. These things were endowed
with their own dominant entity — a peculiar
individuality which silenced the question before
it found expression. The visual confounded the
intellectual. I was not breathless or fearful, I
seemed only to have turned into a remote by-way
that spoke with almost audible emphasis to some
long dormant brain-cell, just awakened, to revive its
ancient memories. And, realizing this, there was
nothing but to go on and break the silence of this
mysterious estate.

Ere I gained the door and reached for the
corroded knocker I became conscious that my
mind was operating with an extraordinarily rapid
introspection. This that I was about to discover
seemed more nearly, more purely personal, with
all its uncertainty, than every intimate and personal
relationship 1 had ever formed. So now, with an
absolute abandonment to all that the time and
place might yield, I knocked thrice.

The dull clangour filled the house. I could

THE HOUSE INVISIBLE 71

hear it booming through the halls till its reverbera-
tions smoothed out into the hollow silences that
brooded everywhere. Then, with an insistence
that defied the unreality of its own conception, I
knocked again and waited, my eyes fixed on that
door I knew must open.

There came presently a sound from within. I
remember it as being not so much sound itself as
a promise of sound, whispering from distances
infinitely more remote than those compassed by
the house walls. It was as if something were
getting ready to begin to move, something that
stretched and stirred in doubt ere its aged sinews
were trusted to perform their office.

Again, as the door yielded, I felt no fear. I
was staring at a man old beyond understanding,
so old that the whiteness of his brows curved
down over the brilliancy of eyes that mocked at
his own antiquity. His dress was a long tunic,
half hidden by the winter of his beard ; his
shoulders were bent as from the weight of im-
memorial time, and the hand that trembled on
the latch was waxen and shrivelled. He seemed,
indeed, the epitome of a senescent humanity, the

72 THE HOUSE INVISIBLE

cycle of whose years rivalled that of the stars in
their courses.

The bent figure inclined still further. "You
are expected," he said ; and, at the words, I could
almost hear centuries slipping into indistinction.

He turned into the long hall, and I followed.
On the floor I could see his footmarks in the
dust. To right and left stood armour, even as
other armour I knew; but this was covered with
dust ; gorget, brassart, pauldron, and greave ;
defiled, neglected, and forgotten. Above there
were pictures, once more the parallel ; but these
were lost in the film that had settled on them
from the breathless atmosphere. I had been
sleeping, sleeping for years, and now returned to
my own, to find it mute and wellnigh obliterated,
and barren of all attributes save only memories.

Behind the shuffling feet I mounted the great
stairway — till the ancient servitor pointed to a
closed door, and there he left me. I was con-
scious, for a moment, of his uncertain footsteps,
and when they ceased he had vanished into the
void of that Nirvana from which he came.

Then, from the invisible room, a woman's voice

THE HOUSE INVISIBLE 73

called; a voice unclouded by threat, unsoftened
by supplication ; and, at the sound of it, the latch
yielded and I entered.

There stood the Presence, and instantly my
eyes were unsealed. She was not a Deity, but
an embodiment of whatever of the Divine was
harboured in myself. Each year of my life
yielded its memories toward this recognition, and
my understanding slowly built itself up to speak.

No man shall describe the Presence. In dreams
we may glimpse her. Sometimes, when we sound
the depths or scale the heights, the momentary
gleam of her robe appears to the vision that
has been cleansed by suffering or joy. But
always the vision is measured by our weakness.

This knowledge came to me at that instant.
"Your name?" I said with reverence.

"I am nameless until I join that other self,
whom I know not," came the reply.

"And this house?" I ventured, breathless with
mystery.

"Is the house that he has builded for me."

My mind flashed back to the mansion on the
scented plain.

74 THE HOUSE INVISIBLE

" This dust ? " I said, wonderingly.

" Listen," she answered ; and my consciousness
went out to meet her beneath the lifting veil.
"All the world over, men build houses for the
body and the mind, but what man has guessed
that then also is builded the house of the Spirit ?
Stone for stone, window for window, the one
rises with the other. And when all is done, and
the hearth fire gleams, then the Spirit takes her
habitation."

Her voice ceased. The blank deserted silence
of the ghostly place closed in, till, through it, I
heard my own utterance — small, thin, and seeming
infinitely remote. "There is death here."

" The house of the body speaks of that which
is gained," replied the Presence, " but the home
of the Spirit of that which is lost."

Vainly I fought for words. Dust, dust ! I
could think of nothing but dust.

"The armour is stained," went on the gentle
voice, " and the roses have closed the paths where
I would walk. My house is cold and desolate,
and there is only one room left."

"And that room? " I said fearfully.

THE HOUSE INVISIBLE 75

11 Is the time that is left" she whispered.

My soul turned to assail me. Blindly I groped
for one ray of light in this darkness of my own
creation, in this gloom in which my own impotent
Spirit was enshrouded. It was only a little room
that remained for her to inhabit. It was my own
study. A few intimate things were there. I
remembered choosing them because they were
fraught with attributes of which I could never tire.

"You know not this man?" I said, marvelling.

"Only when my house is pure and fragrant
shall I know him." She turned to the window :
"Look!"

Beneath it smiled my gardener's cottage, just
as I had left it, on the edge of the moorland. It
was alive with light, beautiful with love and care,
bedded in roses and the songs of birds. As I
looked it seemed that the old man himself passed
down the trim walks, and the flowers nodded
after him.

" He builded better than he knew," I whispered.
" Men call him a simpleton."

" What man shall judge another ? I would
that his house were mine. His Spirit has never

76 THE HOUSE INVISIBLE

wandered from home, and dwells not in one room."
Mystical and transcendant sounded the voice of the
Presence. " Man has many habitations, but only
one house invisible. Its dust is man's pride, its
solitude is man's selfishness, and that which he
sometimes counts as lost is its beauty. As he
gives, so it is glorified ; and when he is humble
the house is filled with music."

I gazed at the vision of the gardener, framed
into the riot of his lovely blooms. Softly came
the answer to the question that trembled on my
lips.

"The great ones of the earth can build
spiritual hovels, but the labourer can rear a palace
for his soul."

The film that all my life had obscured my sight
suddenly rolled back. All those garments of
satisfaction and self-esteem that had for years
enveloped me were clean stripped away. In one
terrible instant I saw myself naked and utterly
revealed. What man, seeing this, shall not
tremble ?

I knelt, abased in supplication. I gazed, but
my eyes faltered before the essence suddenly

THE HOUSE INVISIBLE 77

radiating from the transfigured Presence. The
mortal in me recoiled from this embodiment of
immortality. The glory and the dream had
visited me.

Thus, for a long time, sightless and silent, till
a breath of fragrance reached me and a delicate
wind kissed my trembling lids.

In fear and wonderment I looked again and saw
— the soft undulations of the flower-strewn plain,
stretching to the sea. The long rift, the black
tarn, that ancient house, the dust and desolation —
all had vanished.

Slowly, almost unconsciously, my steps were
retraced, like those of a man "moving about in
worlds half realized." I was still suspended some-
where between this solid infrangible earth and one
more tenuous, more elusive, and yet not less real ;
and it was the gardener who greeted me as he
leaned lovingly over his roses.

" They're wunnerful, maister, they're wunner-
ful," he said, with a pink bud lying like a fairy
shell in the cup of his wrinkled hand. " An' ye
know, maister, summat tells me they're even more
than that."

78 THE HOUSE INVISIBLE

I caught the quiet sunshine of his mild blue eye,
the eye of a Spirit that had never wandered far
from home. "Yes," I muttered, staring at him
with a sudden, strange, breathless interest, "I
think they're more than that."

THE TRAINING OF CHILIQUI

As of old the red man's child
Learns the language of the wild.
And the unwritten laws prevail
When the hunter strikes the trail :
" Silent come and silent go ;
Leave no coal of fire to glow ;
Kill no more than ye may eat ;
Follow close a stranger' s feet ;
By the gray goose read the weather ;
Wisdom lies neat h fur and feather ;
Long trailt end where they begin ;
Hunger knows not kith or kin ;
All but speech is understood
By the shy things of the wood"

THE TRAINING OF CHILIQUI

GREAT SLAVE LAKE swings an enormous arm a
hundred miles into the North-west, and Fort
Rae lies on its northerly side just about half
way up.

Fifty miles from Fort Rae lived Kee-cow-ray,
the Frozen-foot, War-choola, the Sunbeam, his
wife, and Chiliqui, the Little Man ; Dogribs all.
There had also been Kee-ocho, the Big Dog.
The manner of his going will be told anon.

Chiliqui had rolled happily through a naked
childhood, till, in his twelfth year, little lumps of
muscle began to swell on his arms and shoulders.
Then he put away childish things and in the
evenings sat silent, listening to his parents and
watching them with wise black eyes.

Musk oxen made the first great impression.
Kee-cow-ray, with a band of hunters, had crossed
the big lake and tramped up the Yellow Knife

river and struck east into the musk ox country
F si

82 THE TRAINING OF CHILIQUI

that lies north of Lake Mackay. This is the
Land of Little Sticks that fringes the borders of
the barrens. Here the spruce and birch and jack
pine dwindle to a ragged edge, and thrust straggling
out-posts of small timber into the naked country
that marches unbroken to the Arctic.

Things had gone well with Kee-cow-ray that
trip, and Chiliqui's eyes glittered as he heard.
They were very intimate things that Kee-cow-ray
spoke of — one would have thought that he himself
was a musk ox endowed with speech as he told of
their food — the white moss of the barren lands,
of their migration to winter shelter and the patrol
of the bulls around the cows and calves.

Chiliqui's heart was thumping with a new-born
lust to kill. "More, my father, tell me more! "

"They are very wise," went on Kee-cow-ray.
"They go to the woods in winter because the
snow is soft, and they can reach their food. Also
when snow comes the calf is very young."

"And then?"

"The cow takes it to a deep valley, and as the
snow deepens it lies still till, bye-and-bye, it is
covered in a little teepee of its own."

THE TRAINING OF CHILIQUI 83

" And dies of hunger ? "

"Kahween, not so," said Kee-cow-ray, smiling.
" There is a hole in the teepee and the calf puts
its head out to draw milk from its mother."

Chiliqui stared hard at him, but knew truth
when he heard it, and his father went on to tell
him more. How sickness takes the oxen from flies
snuffed into their throats when feeding, and from
wasps that burrow beneath their hair to lay eggs :
how their tracks are all in line because their legs
are too short to trot and the breast hair is so long
that they step on it when grazing. At the last,
being outcast from the herd by reason of bad
temper or old age, they follow till the big gray
coast wolves pull them down. "It was a good
hunt," concluded Kee-cow-ray, and then pulled
hard at his pipe and looked thoughtfully at
his son.

War-choola cut into the glance and caught her
husband's eyes. " Is it not time ? " she said
slowly.

Kee-cow-ray nodded. "Yes. It is time.
Wabun — to-morrow. "

Chiliqui wiggled out of his blanket next morning

84 THE TRAINING OF CHILIQUI

and found the fire alight. This was strange, for
the lighting of that fire had been his special duty
ever since he could remember. Beside it sat War-
choola with misty eyes, and beside War-choola lay
things that he had regarded for months with
breathless anticipation.

His mother put her arms around him. " My
son will soon be a man, the little son I carried so
long on my back." Then she kissed him many
times and dressed him in a new caribou suit,
young skins with the hide cured to a soft leather.
On his feet she wound great blanket socks and
folded his sleeping robe around his shoulders.
Then there was a beautiful new hand axe and a
light skinning knife, and a tea kettle, and a tump
line of shagganappi, which is rawhide. Last of
all a fire-bag with flint and steel and punkwood,
and, most wonderful of all, a miniature pipe, the
bowl made of the dew claw of a bear, the stem
being the long wing bone of a crane. Then over
his head she put the capote or hunting cap, and, as
the light at the door darkened, Chiliqui, garbed
as a hunter, looked up to see Kee-cow-ray smiling
at him. Something moved in the boy that he

THE TRAINING OF CHILIQUI 85

could not understand, but the gates of a new
world opened.

Three hours later he was swinging along
through the deep snow ten feet behind his
father. The big man left but a poor trail to
follow. It fell in on his shoes till insteps and
calves were cords of pain from lifting them.
Then came big timber, where the wind had not
penetrated, and every tree, branch and twig,
every stump and log was crowned with fantastic
mounds and minarets of snow. It lay deep and
undulating, a thick crystalline fleece imprinted
everywhere by the life of the forest.

To Chiliqui the silence was portentous. It
closed in and followed him all day, throbbing
with all the mysteries to be solved before he
became a hunter. At night he gathered dry
wood because it was smokeless and without smell
of burning, and watched Kee-cow-ray build the
fire from the twinkle of flame his son had
kindled.

An Arctic owl winnowed noiselessly through
the gloom, and the lad lay on his side while his
father told him more than he had ever dreamed

86 THE TRAINING OF CHILIQUI

about owls. How the three round eggs are laid
in early spring and the young birds are thrust out
on to the snow to do for themselves, and why
the mother owl does the hunting. He had never
understood that before, but it was very natural
after all, because she plucked her own breast to
line the nest and her cold skin would never hatch
eggs — of course not. So the royal disdainful
father sat warmly on the eggs while his bare-
fleshed wife killed rabbits and ptarmigan, and
husky mice and lemming, and fed her lord till
the day appointed for his release. And just as
Kee-cow-ray was explaining why the owls stole
each other's eggs, and the reason for the under
feathers of birds being darker than those on top,
while the under fur of all animals is the lighter,
his voice died out of Chiliqui's ears and the boy's
eyes closed.

All next day he stayed close in camp while
his father followed fresh moose tracks. In the
evening, in that half light that slips in between
day time and night, when animals wake up and
white and brown men get drowsy, a rifle spoke
over the hills, once, and again once. At this

THE TRAINING OF CHILIQUI 87

Chiliqui became very busy packing up, because
it is easier to move camp to a moose than to drag
the great beast for miles through the underbrush
to a camp that you can put on your shoulders in
ten minutes and carry for eight hours of daylight.
Then he waited in the silence till someone laughed
behind him, and he turned to see Kee-cow-ray
knocking the icicles off his short beard before he
lighted his pipe.

When it was all over, the new camp made —
the moose skinned and his huge head and horns
hoisted into a birch tree to propitiate the spirits
of all the moose — when Chiliqui rested, blood-
stained as to his fingers and new caribou tunic,
Kee-cow-ray thrust a hard finger into the red
bowl of his pipe and spoke. A new companion-
ship had arisen between them, one that would last
to the end. It was the bond of trail and camp,
of fire and danger and blood, the old primal bond
that first held men and tribes together. Kee-cow-
ray knew it and his quiet mind sped back to one
just such another night, when another son had
smiled happily at him across just such another
fire. Now his eyes rested on Chiliqui, caught

88 THE TRAINING OF CHILIQUI

the strength in the lad's lithe form, the play of
young blood beneath his smooth skin, and met
the steady gaze that searched his own. " It is
of Kee-ocho I would speak," he said slowly.

Again a great white owl began to winnow
beneath the trees and a fantastic crown of snow
tumbled soundless from a branch beside them.
Chiliqui's glance never wavered. "Tell me of
my brother," he said.

Kee-cow-ray's face, seamed with the rigour of
northern winters, fixed itself into a leathern mask.
"It is ten summers ago that I took your brother
to hunt, even as I take you, little son."

There was that in his voice that mingled with
the puttering of the fire and the almost imper-
ceptible whisper of wind loitering through the tree
tops, for nature fashions to herself the words of
those who follow and understand. "Behind the
camp we found two lakes that touched, and
where they touched was a dam built by many
beavers."

An unspoken question jumped at him across
the fire. "The dam was high," he replied, "and
the beaver roads were deep and there were many

THE TRAINING OF CHILIQUI 89

different tooth marks. I told Kee-ocho to wait
there while I went to the end of the lake where
the beavers were working."

Chiliqui shivered a little in spite of himself.
This brother of whom he had thought so much
and heard so little was coming very close now.

"At the end of the lake I killed, and on the
way back I stopped to smoke, perhaps one hour,
perhaps two. It was cloudy, but sometimes I
could see Tibikuk Gheezis, the moon. Then as
I smoked I heard a sound in the grass. It came
very slowly and carefully, and because it was near
the ground I said 'it is Muqua, the bear who
walks by night,' for I could hear the weight of
him pressing down on his feet. Tibikuk Gheezis
looked from behind a cloud, and I saw Muqua's
head above the grass. Then I fired very quickly."

Chiliqui leaned forward, tense with the horror
that seared his father's eyes, but the voice held
indomitably on. " I could hear him rolling and
breaking small brush, and then when it was
quiet I went to see — and saw — your brother
Kee-ocho."

There was a quavering lift in Kee-cow-ray's

90 THE TRAINING OF CHILIQUI

tone, so insistent was it that Chiliqui sat and
trembled. " He was quite dead. I shot him in
the throat. He had heard me coming, and
because I stopped he thought I was a bear. I
spoke to the Great Spirit, but He did not answer,
so I knew what I must do having killed my son.
I loaded my rifle and took off my moccasin and lay
down beside him. I told him that I was very sad
and asked him to forgive me and said that he
should not go alone. Then I kissed Kee-ocho and
placed my arm round his neck with the gun at
my own throat and pressed the trigger with
my toe."

His voice failed. The eternal mystery of the
forest closed in on them, father and son. The
fire tumbled into red destruction, the white
owl winged nearer and nearer, a myriad tiny
sounds of the myriad small lives that people the
winter fastnesses became suddenly audible, but the
two fur-clad figures moved not. Then Kee-cow-
ray found speech. "The hammer fell, but the
rifle did not speak. I tried again and once more
it failed. So I got up and put my finger across the
muzzle, and the third time it spoke. So I knew

THE TRAINING OF CHILIQUI 91

what the Spirit meant by not answering. I was
not to kill myself."

Chiliqui's eyes wandered to where the stump of
the little finger marred his father's left hand.
He had regarded that stump with curiosity for
years. Now he knew why his mother always put
the question by, and, reading the boy's thoughts,
Kee-chow-ray continued doggedly :

" I took Kee-ocho in my arms and carried him
home, and that I might not kill your mother also
while you were at her breast, I called loudly
' I am Kee-cow-ray the hunter, who has killed
his son,' and when War-choola heard me she
thought I was mad — and that was better than
nothing."

Again his voice sank, and Chiliqui, gazing at
him speechless, knew that this was something not
for him, but he did the one and only thing he
could do and kissed his father on both cheeks
and slipped into his blanket, leaving the still
figure staring with unseeing eyes into the ashes
of the fire.

Now the tale of that winter can be told you
by any lad, be he Dogrib or Cree or Yellow Knife

92 THE TRAINING OF CHILIQUI

or Saulteau ; for all through the north country
from Hudson's Bay to the foothills, from Lake
Winnipeg up through the barren lands, the tale is
the same. It is the old story of the training of
men. Beside the camp fire the history of the
hunt is unfolded to young eyes and brains, the
intimate history of the matching of the red-man
against his ancient prey.

Chiliqui learned to walk silently and to mark
everything. He learned the signs and tracks, to
obey implicitly, and then for the first time he killed.
Next winter he hunted again with his father, but
this time he walked ahead, a noiseless copper-
coloured slip of youth, animated by all the inherited
skill of his ancestors. And because the lad's soul
was brave and his eye quick and his finger steady,
he became a hunter before the beard sprouted on
his chin.

When single-handed he killed first, it was a
timber wolf that fell, a gaunt grey apparition,
maddened with hunger, that died in mid-air while
he was launched at the lad's face. He dropped,
and kicked and stiffened, the black gums lifting
slowly from his long fangs, his jaws locking in the

THE TRAINING OF CHILIQUI 93

last defiant grin of death. The boy looked
at him, soberly — he knew what he must do —
and what was to follow that. So he stripped
off the long matted hide and wrapped the red
heart in it and the skull he placed as every
hunter places it.

That evening War-choola looked at him
standing in the tent door, very tall, very slight,
the brown face smiling triumphantly, and a pang
went through her for no more should she call him
"little son."

And while he told his story, modestly as a
hunter should, his mother laid aside the skin of
the wolf's head with its smooth nose-hair, and
long cleft jaws and triangular ears, to make a
capote for her son.

Then the girls of the camp came in laughing,
and Chiliqui bared his right arm. When the arm
had been rubbed with grease the prettiest of them
all scored it with a fish bone and needle. All the
time Chiliqui moved not nor spoke, keeping his
eyes on his father, then when the arm was tied
with rags, he rose — a man at last — and a member
of his tribe.

94 THE TRAINING OF CHILIQUI

And of all who laughed and feasted, who could
have guessed that Chiliqui was fated to wander
over half a continent and die a famous chief,
where Ponce-coupe's plains look across at the hills
of the Peace River ?

THE LAST PATROL

From Bermondsey and Brighton,

From Auckland and the Forth,
From all the seas are gathered in

The wardens of the North ;
Whose empty spaces bind them

That they return no more,
To all they left behind them

And all thev lived before.

And some -would fain remember,

And some would fain forget,
That down the hollow Kentish lanes

The 'wild rose lingers yet ;
That 'cross the moor and through the glen

The infant rivers run ; —
The days were long in Scotland then,

But here — the midnight sun ;

And here the great auroras swing

Like curtains in the sky,
The wild swan lifts his trumpeting,

The grey goose hurtles by ;
For half the year the naked land

Is sheathed in rigid mail ;
Brothers ! God wot, ye understand

Who tramp the Daw son trail.

THE LAST PATROL

FITZGERALD'S patrol was due in Dawson on
February the ist. After three weeks of storm
and cold, the Indian Esau arrived, saying that he
had left Fitzgerald on January the ist, at
Mountain Creek, twenty days' easy travelling
from Dawson.

Thereupon Synder, commanding B division on
the Yukon, thought hard, and telegraphed to
Perry, Commissioner at Regina, via Eagle, Valdez,
and wireless.

Perry's answer halted, for the wires went down
under the weight of winter winds. But, when it
did arrive, Dempster's patrol pulled out for Fort
McPherson on the very same day. With him
were Constable Fyfe, ex-Constable Turner, Indian
Charles Stewart, and three teams of five dogs
each.

Three weeks later, Dempster, having tramped
four hundred and fifty miles, was swinging down

»7

98 THE LAST PATROL

the Peel River. His eyes, roving restlessly,
picked up an old snowshoe trail. Turning
sharply, he followed it up the steep bank and
pushed his way into a clump of ground willows.
There he stopped, stared hard and long, and
stooped over something that broke the smooth
curves of drifting snow.

From Fort McPherson south-west to Dawson as
the crow flies is three hundred and fifty miles.
As man walks it is five hundred. As water runs
it is a good deal more. Inspector Fitzgerald told
Corporal Somers that it was just about thirty-five
days, and, as you will see, Somers had reason to
remember that just three months later.

Fitzgerald's orders were very brief. He was
to patrol to Dawson in the winter of 1910-11.
Thus wrote the Commissioner in Regina to the
Comptroller in Ottawa, the summer before.
There was nothing unusual about it. The
Mounted Police were threading the wilderness
everywhere.

So Fitzgerald gathered in Constables Kinney
and Taylor, and Special Constable Carter, who
had made the trip once, from the other end, four

THE LAST PATROL 99

years before. Also he requisitioned, to be exact,
twelve hundred and fifty-six pounds of supplies.
These included nine hundred pounds of fish for
the fifteen train-dogs. In other words, he allowed
two and one-quarter pounds of food per man per
day, which is less than the subarctic standard
ration. It was to be a record patrol. Every
pound of weight was a handicap.

Now, the recognized route is up the Peel a
hundred miles, across the big bend eighty more,
hit the Peel again, then turn up through the
Big Wind into the Little Wind River, till you
strike Forrest Creek. This takes you by way of
Mountain Creek to the gaunt backbone of the
big divide. Here the waters on your left hand
flow into Bering Sea and on your right into the
Arctic. Once over the big divide you strike
Wolf Creek, then down hill, across the glaciers,
the Little Hart River and Christmas Creek and
the Blackstone. These are Yukon waters. All
of this sounds geographic. In winter-time, in the
North, it is something more, for here geography
is vital and insistent.

On December the 2 ist, which was a Wednesday,

100 THE LAST PATROL

a pygmy caravan swung out on the broad expanse
of the Peel. Three men, three dog teams, one
man — that was the order of going. The wind
was strong and the cold was bitter. Fifty-one
below on the tenth day — you have the figures in
Fitzgerald's diary for it. Half-way over the
eighty-mile portage is Caribou Born Mountain.
Eighteen hundred feet above the stark wilderness
it shoulders, mantled with great drifts, plastered
with ice, searched and harried by every wind that
lifts across these speechless wastes. The trail
clings to its bleak flanks ; and over the trail
toiled Fitzgerald's patrol.

What shall be said of the trail to you who
know it not ? The air is tense and sharp, it
almost rings. The nights are luminous with
ghostly fires that palpitate through the sparkling
zenith. The days are full of aching, destroying,
indomitable effort, when the body summons all its
powers to live under the weight of arctic frosts.
And through the body run the pain and torture of
burning sinews and scorched sight, till the inner-
most essence of courage and fortitude and
contempt of death rise up to laugh out in these

THE LAST PATROL 101

silences. Here the soul ot a man shouts aloud,
for life is terrible and fierce.

On January the 8th, on Little Wind River,
it was sixty-four below, with a strong head wind.
A day or two before the temperature was the
same, and Fitzgerald records some slight frost-
bites. What eloquence of brevity !

Then began the search for Forrest Creek, that
led to the big divide. It will be remembered
that Carter had come from Dawson once, but
he had come north. There was a vast difference.
In between times he had been roaming the
subarctics, and, with the exception of a few
gaunt landmarks, the great ridges and plains
of the Yukon district are like brothers all.
There was also the map that Barrel drew the
summer before. But Barrel was on his way
in a canoe from La Pierre House, near the
Alaskan frontier, to the Red River, south of
Winnipeg. This was a matter of some three
thousand miles. So he was in a hurry and did
not spend much time when he stopped at the
Fort, and Fitzgerald was not there to see him
draw it and ask questions.

102 THE LAST PATROL

A few days later the inspector pulled up.
The Dawson trail was lost. The tributaries
of the Little Wind River, among which some-
where lay Forrest Creek, had yielded no clue.
Precious days were spent in which dauntless
humanity had braved the double rigour of cold
and a gradually increasing hunger. In these
latitudes the body cries out for food. Its demand
is primordial and relentless, and what the body
receives it almost instantly transmutes into
strength and bodily warmth, into an inward
glow to fortify it against the death that other-
wise is sure. In the north, to be hungry is to
be cold, and to be cold is to invite the end.

All of this Fitzgerald knew, and yet, when
his lean brigade faced backward on the trail,
there was left of the provisions only ten pounds
of bacon, eight pounds of flour, and some dried
fish, the latter for the dogs. The delay was
the price of his contempt for hardship and danger.
But you must know that hunger and cold were
no strangers to the police. They met and
grappled yearly, with no quarter asked.

On the seventeenth of January began the

THE LAST PATROL 103

retreat of beaten men. Who shall say what
thoughts animated them, moving like specks,
infinitesimally small, over a blank and measureless
expanse ? With nightfall came the first tragedy.
The first-train dog was killed.

Now the dog of the North is cousin to the
wolf and kindred to the fox. He is very wise
and his teeth are very sharp. But here, more
than in all the world, he is the friend and servant
of man. By the trail you will know him, when
his shoulders jam tight into the collar and his
tawny sides break into ripples with the play
of tireless muscles underneath. Man may
at times kill man, but not, save in the last
extremity, may man kill dog.

Fitzgerald's axe fell. There was a quick
twitching of sinews and a snarling from the
fourteen comrades of the trace. Then some-
thing older than man himself rose in them and
they drew back from the gory fragments of
their brother. Their bellies were empty, their
eyes glanced shiftily and winking at their masters.
Insensate hunger was assailing their entrails, but
dog would not eat dog.

104 THE LAST PATROL

Thus continued the agonizing march. Their
bodies, lacking natural food, began slowly to
capitulate their outposts to the frost. Grey
patches appeared on faces and arms and there
was no rush of warm blood to repel the invader.
Day by day with dwindling strength these in-
domitable souls fought on, giving of themselves
to the fight, but day by day having less to give.
That is the great drama of the North. It
demands, it seizes, it usurps; but, for itself, it
does nothing but wait. It closes in little by little,
by day and night, always waiting and always
taking, till, after a little moment of its eternal
silence, it has taken everything.

By February the 5th many things had happened.
The dauntless four had travelled about two
hundred miles on dog-meat. The river ice was
weighted down with its burden of snow, and
both Carter and Taylor had plunged through
into numbing waters while the temperature was
fifty-six below. The human organism shrank
from its savage portion of canine flesh. The
skin began to split and peel and blacken. The
tissues of their bodies shrank and contracted

THE LAST PATROL 105

closer and closer round hearts that still beat
defiantly. Feet and hands began to freeze,
and ominous grey patches mottled their high
cheek-bones that stood out sharply from hollow
faces.

When and where Taylor and Kinney dropped
behind is the secret of the North. But soon
after the fifth a morning came when they did
not break camp with the others, and the fort
was only thirty-five miles away. The parting
must have been brief. Then, in the grey of
the arctic morning, Fitzgerald and Carter sum-
moned their last reserves of failing strength and
staggered on for help.

The day waxed and waned in the little camp
and all around closed in the stark and stinging
wilderness. Food there was none. By now the
organs of the body, lacking sustenance, had
turned upon each other to destroy. Hunger
had changed from a dull pain to a fierce gnaw-
ing and snatching at the vitals. With cracked
fingers they chopped at a moose hide and boiled
the fragments. But their stomachs, which re-
ceded to the backbone, refused to harbour it.

106 THE LAST PATROL

So beneath the Alaska robes they lay and
waited.

Taylor spoke. There came no answer. He
looked into Kinney's face. It stared up blankly
and the hardening body did not yield to his touch.
The comrade of the trail had changed places
with Death — with a new bedfellow from whose
chill embraces he struggled weakly to escape.

Strange visions came into his mind : thoughts of
running water and warm weather and bronzed
men sitting round big camp-fires telling stories of
patrols. And the most interesting of all was
about the Dawson patrol that broke the record
from Fort McPherson under Fitzgerald. Just as
he was getting a light from the next man, his
elbow touched something, and, turning, he saw a
corpse that looked like Kinney. He thrust out a
hand and it encountered something cold. So his
eyes travelled slowly till they saw Kinney's face,
and it was grey with frost. The fire went out.
The men stopped talking. All at once he heard
something coming through the underbrush. It
was strangely difficult to move, for he was still
very sleepy, but he did manage to get hold of his

THE LAST PATROL 107

carbine. Then something lurched toward him,
lumbering and dreadful, and he pointed the
carbine straight at its crimson, dripping mouth, and
crooked his finger.

A shot rang out, sudden and sharp. It rolled
from the little camp, through the scant timber
fringing the river-bank, up into the motionless
atmosphere and toward the diamond-pointed stars.
There was no one left to hear it. But Christ is
wise and merciful, and He understood how it was
that Taylor lay with the top of his head blown
off, beside his comrade of the trail.

The price was not yet paid ; the North
demanded full tribute. Ten miles nearer home,
twenty-five miles from the cheer and warmth of
Fort McPherson, it was paid in full. Ex-
Constable Carter lay on his back, with folded
hands and a handkerchief over his face. Beside
him crouched Fitzgerald, battling for life. His
stiffening fingers wrote laboriously with a charred
stick on a scrap of paper. His stricken eyes
moved from it to the still figure, then back to his
writing. " All money in despatch-bag and bank,
clothes, etc., I leave to my beloved mother." It

108 THE LAST PATROL

was all very clear and plain. Then, as the
ultimate distress seized him, he added, "God
bless all."

He was now conscious that it was left for him
to balance the account. The physical struggle
was ended. There remained only the mental
anguish. So Fitzgerald must have summoned to
his aid all the heroic traditions, all the magnificent
discipline of the service. He faced the end like
a soldier and an officer, without rancour, fear, or
complaint. He gave himself, all of himself, to
that baptism of mortality with which the vast
spaces of this silent country are being redeemed.

Winds blew. Snow fell. The hollow caverns
of the North emptied themselves of storm and
blizzard. And after weeks of silence came
Dempster.

He had searched Forrest Creek, but found no
sign. Little Wind River did not speak of the
vanished brigade. The Big Wind had no word
of them save deserted camps and the black hearts
of dead fires. Caribou Born Mountain held its
peace, for they were not there, but the sign came
when the Peel began to broaden to the Arctic.

THE LAST PATROL 109

First, a despatch-bag in Old Colin's lonely
cabin ; then a tent and a stove ; then dog-harness
from which had been cut all hair and hide that
might retain anything of nourishment. Thus
grew the tokens that tightened the cords round
Dempster's breast and chilled the hot blood
pumping through his heart.

And, at the end of it all, two rigid forms
beneath their sleeping-bags. The face of one
blue and blotched, painted with all the fearful
colouring of frozen death. The other no longer
the face of a man.

A few miles further on, their brothers of the
trail, the hands of one crossed, his eyes decently
closed and covered. Beside him the lost leader,
the last to die.

Race now with Dempster to Fort McPherson,
only twenty-five miles away. Call Corporal
Somers and make with him the last short journey
that brought Fitzgerald's patrol back home again.
Stand and watch the three Indians dig a great
grave in the iron earth. Listen to Whittaker,
English Church missionary, speaking trembling
words over the four rough coffins. Guard your

110 THE LAST PATROL

ears while the red flames leap and the echoes
crash from the rifles of the firing party. And,
when you have done all this, do one thing more :
Remember that while the wilderness endures there
will also endure those to whom its terrors are but
an invitation; those who will meet its last
demands with the calm cognizance that mocks at
danger.

Brothers of the pack-strap and the saddle —
well-tried comrades of the trail — sojourners in
silent places — honour to the Service and to
you all !

PLUS AND MINUS

When you grumble at the narrowness of fate

And itch to do the things you never do,
When you pine for other pleasures, long to dance to other measures

y Mid conditions periodically blue>
This one important axiom understand,

If s the only blessed thing to pull you through —
Tho* from dust you were created, for your job a man was slated

And the fellow is most generally — you.

PLUS AND MINUS

IT was at the close of a dreary winter day that
three men sat in front of a great fire-place in a
well-known city club — three men whose distinctive
personalities were revealed by the yellow light
of leaping flame. Around them was the sub-
dued atmosphere which men of affairs look for
and appreciate in their social haven, an array of
deep yawning leather chairs and broad flat tables
littered with periodicals, an expanse of sober-
coloured carpet into which the foot sank noise-
lessly. Their talk had drifted unconsciously from
the topics of the day to what might be termed
individualities — they were expressing not so much
their opinions as themselves, and — old cronies
all — each offering to friendly vivisection was made
in sincerity and received with courteous respect.

Penrose, the artist, a tall, slight, delicate man,
was speaking, slowly and thoughtfully. "It is
curious," said he, "how very few things do really

114 PLUS AND MINUS

interest and hold us ; we live in such a kaleidoscope
that our attention is continually diverted to some
new phase — colour scheme — to speak profes-
sionally, and as our minds grow agile in movement
they seem to lose retention. Perhaps it's our
interpretation of things that is at fault. Person-
ally, I am deeply conscious of loss in this respect."
The others did not speak at once ; they were
wondering how Penrose could complain of a
deadened sensibility — Penrose, who had mixed
into his paints such a quintessence of delicate
feeling and perception that his work was prized
above that of any modern artist.

At last Stevenson, the iron-master, broke in:
"My dear fellow, if Hulett or myself had entered
that complaint there would be reason in it ; but
you — you see things that we are blind to and
cannot realize till we get the chance of buying
your paintings, and that doesn't come any too
often."

"Perhaps I will be more clear if I put it
another way. There are things which one may
think are not worth the effort to obtain ; some
other one makes the effort and does obtain.

PLUS AND MINUS 115

Now, although we still question the value of that
particular thing to ourselves, we begin to be just
a trifle disgruntled, because some one else has
decided otherwise, and acted upon that decision."

"Heavens, Penrose," put in Hulett, "that
sounds remarkably commercial to come from such
an untainted source as yourself! "

The others both laughed, and Hulett continued :
u What do you feel the need of? You've got the
world to paint, and the world wants you to paint
it. Stevenson makes steel rails and is haunted by
tariff reform, and I manufacture cloth and fight
the labour unions. You don't want to change
places with us, do you ? "

" No, I don't. I suppose it's all due to that
unrest which some good-natured poet has called
divine, but honestly I am impressed by what you
men are doing. You feed thousands ; you create
wealth ; you strengthen the nation — and, curiously
enough, my keenest impression is not about my
own work, but Stevenson's."

The latter turned in his seat and looked at
Penrose : "What is it, old man? "

"It's the trip I took with you two years ago.

116 PLUS AND MINUS

It seems to grow more vivid every day ; I have
forgotten much, but never that ! "

Inquisitive to see the picture of his own work
in the artist's mind, Stevenson said: "Tell us,
just as you see it now."

The slight figure in the big chair began to
speak very quietly.

" I went on board a steel ship, one-eighth of a
mile long, and took possession of as perfect a
cabin as I ever had on the Cunard. I was borne
across a great inland ocean to a place where
another ocean plunges into it, was lifted up, and
in twelve hours had gone another two hundred
miles."

Stevenson chuckled — u We had her wide open
for his benefit, Hulett," but Penrose continued :

" Then I came to great caverns that went down
into the very bowels of Mother Earth. Here a
regiment of huge machines were tearing and
gnawing at mountains of iron ore, and dropping
it by the ton into steel cars. The cars were
hurried away to the water's edge, and were seized
by some kind of mechanical monster, and their
contents literally upset into gaping pockets. The

PLUS AND MINUS 117

pockets emptied themselves into the steamers that
lay beside them, at the rate of ten thousand tons
in six hours. Across the water they swept to
long docks where machines with titan arms and
hands plunged them into the holds of the ships,
scooped out the ore and flung it into other cars.
These bore the ore to other artificial mountains,
from which the furnaces were fed with fuel and
stone and iron. Night and day they roared and
vomited molten metal, out of which the dross
was blown by a cyclonic blast. Then came the
rolls — monumental, resistless, inflexible — they
received the steel billets, crushing, flattening,
shaping, till out of heat and toil and power came
the steel rails, miles and miles of them, as I
watched. All this without the touch of a human
hand. Now that is something I can never forget,
and I see it all more vividly than the greatest
canvas of the greatest painter — and yet I call
myself an artist," he added, half contemptuously.

Stevenson's gray eyes were riveted on the
speaker. It was all true — just as Penrose had
told it. It was his work — good work — and he
knew it ; and yet he had never looked on it in

118 PLUS AND MINUS

this way ; he had been too much a part of the
picture himself to appreciate its magnificent pro-
portions. A curious idea came into his mind, and,
anxious to prove it, he turned to Hulett.

" Impressions are in order, Hulett, tell us yours —
the impression above all others."

The latter sat gazing studiously into the red
coals. " Well," he said at length, " oddly enough,
my memory goes back thirty years. I had just
left Yale, and was having a fling before shouldering
my burdens, and had drifted up into Canada, moose
shooting. We, the guide and I, had been out
all day, and when night came were miles from
camp ; it had been a hard day, too, on snow-shoes,
and I was about all in. Dark found us on top of
a ridge looking down into a spruce-covered hollow ;
pretty inhospitable, I thought, till the guide raised
his hand and pointed.

" ' Look,' he said — ' Smoke '

" Smoke, sure enough, it was, a thin wreath of
it curling over the tree tops. We dived down
the slopes and in a few minutes found the camp.
It was a Hudson Bay trapper's — a big tepee made
of skins and bark — about twenty feet in diameter,

PLUS AND MINUS 119

and pointed like a Pierrot's hat. We lifted the
flap and looked in. The trapper, a fine old chap,
was mending snares, and his wife and daughter —
the latter a perfect beauty — were sitting on
rabbit-skin rugs and making snow-shoes. The
place was spotless and a fire crackled in the middle
of it all — I tell you I never saw anything so invit-
ing in my life."

"Youth, youth, ever blessed youth," murmured
Stevenson, but Hulett raised an insistent hand and
went on :

" There was mighty little there, and I knew it,
but what there was, was complete. There lay the
beauty of it. The old fellow welcomed us with
the manner of an aristocrat — asked not a single
question, except were we hungry. The women
got kettles and things, and he went outside, dug
in the snow, and brought in some partridge and
rabbits and fish, and put them all in the pot to-
gether ; then they made dough-boys — delectable
balls of flour and grease — and put those in. They
had tea, and made that, and, when all was ready,
waited on us with a grave solicitude that I have
only seen equalled in the chief steward of this

120 PLUS AND MINUS

club. When we had finished, they gave us robes
to sleep in, and as I rolled over, I noticed that the
old woman had already started to mend my socks.

"It seemed only a few moments till I woke, but
it was morning; our breakfast was ready, and it
was as good as our supper. When I was leaving,
I noticed a red sandstone pipe the old boy had
been smoking, and offered to buy it. He took it
out of his mouth and said : ' It is yours.'

" And now listen. He put us on our trail, and
when I insisted on his taking money, he simply
drew himself up like the gorgeous old pagan he
was, and said:

" ' No, no — you would have done the same for
me,' and was off like a shot.

" Now, gentlemen, would I ? — That's the ques-
tion I have been asking myself periodically ever
since. His interpretation puts mine to shame nine
times out of ten. He had nothing, but he gave
much, and gave it with grace and modest confid-
ence, looking for nothing. He had the largeness
of heart which the competition in our lives is
choking to death. I tell you that terrapin and
pommery have not killed the savour of that stew,

PLUS AND MINUS

and I don't intend that they ever shall. Stevenson
suggests ' youth.' I am with him to a point, but
that old fellow had youth and sweetness of spirit
while we seem to be getting dried up before our
time. Well, you have it, and I expect it's hardly
the kind of impression you were anticipating — eh,
Stevenson ? "

The ironmaster had just lit a cigar and was
intently watching the dwindling end of a match.
"Well, I don't exactly know," he answered; "I
almost did expect something like that, although
my knowledge of your tastes does not associate
you with stews and dough-boys. I have some
kind of an elemental idea in my head that we are
all more or less pagans, or would like to be some-
times— just periodically. We profit by our
civilization, of course, hugely, but there are some
primitive joys we miss on account of it. We are
apt to get so infernally refined that we become
unnatural. Do you remember Bishop Blougram
in Browning, how he

' Rolled him out a mind
Long crumpled, till creased consciousness lay smooth.'

That's what most of us need — to get the wrinkles

128 PLUS AND MINUS

out of mental compositions. I did once, com-
pletely and absolutely — it's my one great im-
pression.

" After the Steel Trust took over our plant, I
went abroad. It had been heavy work ; you
know, perhaps, that our people were the biggest
independents outside the Carnegie lot, and when
the smoke had cleared away and papers were
signed, I went over and stayed in Algiers. I
wanted to get away from everything and every-
body, so moved on east till I came to a little town
called Kroubs, a white-washed patch not far from
the edge of the Sahara. The people were practi-
cally all natives, Moors, Nubians, and Arabs, with
perhaps half a dozen French.

"All that part of Africa was under French
military rule — it was a grazing country — and
Kroubs was really the headquarters of the business
for the province. I stayed in a small Arab hotel
fronting the main street, and lived on coffee, dates,
eggs, and black bread, and spent most of the
time picking up languages and poking my nose
into other people's business. One morning I got
up early and sat at the window before sunrise.

PLUS AND MINUS

The sky had been purple all night and was just
showing a little pink, and across the road was a
big sheep-pen, with high stone walls around it and
a heavy, narrow wooden gate. I could look right
into it, and see hundreds of sheep packed like
sardines in a case, and presently an Arab chief
came up, all dressed in white, with a couple of
Nubians behind him. The two were like ebony
statues, big, tall, and beautifully built; all they
wore was a loin cloth, and they carried gourds for
water bottles. I noticed the chief had a big iron
key hanging from his girdle, and with this opened
the gates. You could hear the old wrought-iron
hinges creak a mile away in the stillness, and the
Nubians stood one on each side as the sheep
came out. There was just room for one at a
time, and, as I live, the Nubians had a name for
each sheep, and they knew it as they were called,
and turned right or left, one after the other.
Now, mind you, there was not a sound, except the
shuffle of their trotters and the queer words these
big black men were saying in a curious, guttural
chuckle of a voice, and yet the sheep knew their
shepherd.

PLUS AND MINUS

" Pretty soon the yard was empty — that white-
clad Arab relocked the gate, and his flocks stood
waiting behind the Nubians. Then they turned
off into the plains — long, low ridges, just like
ground swells covered with short grass. The
Arab disappeared, and I watched the others, one
going south and the other east. They dwindled
as they went, those black pillars with their white
patches following after, until they dropped out of
sight behind a lift of the desert. I rubbed my
eyes and stared. It seemed, somehow, that a
corner of a curtain had been thrown back and I
had had a glimpse into days when Abraham's
herdsmen watched their sheep. It seemed as if
those same Nubians had been guarding those same
flocks in just that way every day since the world
was young, and all the time I kept saying to
myself: ' The sheep knew their shepherd.' Now,
that was the most impressive thing I ever
saw."

There was a long silence around the fireplace as
Stevenson finished. Something of the mystery
and beauty of the scene was in the minds of the
three and they were loath to part with it, when a

PLUS AND MINUS 125

door opened and two men entered — one of them
was speaking rapidly.

"The whole thing might have been avoided
with a fractional loss. It was pure carelessness —
alarm system out of order — engines did not arrive
till too late. It was a mistake in wiring ; got
their positives and negatives confused, and there
was no current."

Stevenson smiled contentedly across the hearth
at the others. "That's it — that's what I was
after — for electricity substitute life ; we don't
know what it is, but we can produce it ; and it
has, in every case, these elements, apparently con-
flicting, but, as a matter of fact, absolutely neces-
sary for the performance of work. Otherwise you
get a dead wire. If we happen to be positives,
we must have our negatives — somewhere, some-
how. And in our own cases there seems to be no
doubt about it."

" The artist and the blast furnace," put in Hulett.

"The ironmaster and the sheep," chuckled
Penrose.

" The manufacturer and the dough-boys," con-
cluded Stevenson.

THE CYCLE OF THE NORTH

A murmur through the barrens — " Comes noiv the change of year ,"
And fur and feather, hair and hide, are very 'wise to hear.

THE CYCLE OF THE NORTH

THE timber fails just beyond the 59th parallel.
First the delicate white birch dwindles, then
the smooth bark poplar before his rougher
brother, then the spruce vanishes, till, beside the
river beds that tempestuous waters have cut deep
below the plains, there is only a fringe of
tamarack and willow and dwarf pine.

Spring moves at first gently across these
solitudes. There is a strange period in April,
when the stark rigour of winter is alleviated by
soft hollows in the north winds. There are
pauses and cessations, intermittent and slowly
more constant, and then the winds swing suddenly
from east and south. Instantly there is a divine
change. On sunward slopes the snow is sucked
up into these gentle airs, and May floats up from
warmer latitudes across leagues of wild heather
and caribou moss.

Then the sturdy growths spring into life. The

129

130 THE CYCLE OF THE NORTH

anemone spreads in great stunted patches of lilac
bloom. The snow forget-me-not thrusts through
the shreds of winter's disappearing blanket, white
as that winter itself, and wild croci flaunt yellow
blossoms streaked with fiery red. On low hind
the tulip is star scattered in deep moss, red also
like fire, and the dwarf saskatoons prepare for
their profusion of hardy pears.

But ere the blossoms come the population of
the barren lands grows with the lengthening days.
First the eagles in royal austerity, beating north
to breed on the islands of the Arctic. Then
dancing clouds of grey-white snow-birds, vocif-
erous rooks and swift wedges of great Canada
geese, flanked with drifting flocks of ducks. All
these are hardy birds, equipped for the broken
weather that yet must come. In the weeks that
follow there is a quick procession, a general immi-
gration of smaller geese and ducks, of cranes, wood-
peckers and plover, and last of all the swans, incred-
ibly high and marvellously swift, whipping the air
with huge wings, whose tip feathers are worn and
broken in the long passage from Florida and the
Carribean, and the remoteness of South America.

THE CYCLE OF THE NORTH 131

On land there is movement and life. Vast
herds of caribou does ripple steadily north to bear
their young, secure because nature has robbed
their hooves of scent, and the grey wolves, the
enemies of their race, cannot thereby track them.
Along the steep shores of Hudson's Bay, the she-
bear issues lean and ravenous, with the young she
has borne and nourished behind a snow bank,
.while she fasted the winter long. The salt
shores are fringed with her hungry sisters, with
tall coast wolves, and white and red foxes, all
seeking the dead things from the sea. Musk
oxen leave the fringe of timber and graze
suspiciously, snuffing flies and mosquitos and
wasps into their red throats, of which many shall
sicken and die.

Now come July and August when the earth is
bright with roses and fruit. The yellow moon-
berry swells from the centre of its four-leaved
white flower. The eyeberry runs riot. Crow-
berries shine like black pearls amid their star-
shaped foliage. The blueberry is everywhere,
with low, flat bushes and clusters of oval sweetness.
The cranberry climbs on the rocks and sands.

THE CYCLE OF THE NORTH

The snakeberry nods in single perfection, poison-
ous on its slender stem, and kinikinic, the weed-
berry, waits till some wandering redman shall
pluck and dry it for the redman' s tobacco.

The plains are carpeted with the profuse
blossom of the wild tea, whose velvety-pointed
leaf brings comfort by many a camp fire. Next
the soil, the coarse, green moss thrusts out its
plum-coloured bloom or spreads viewless beneath
grey tufts that live upon its surface. On the
rocks, splintered by the ice, black lichens stick,
thick and cuplike, ere they whiten and die.

And all this time the days are getting longer
and the air milder, and the stiff earth turns to
slacken her rigid joints and yield the wonderful
life that lives but for weeks. Now, too, may be
seen the operations of those vital laws and customs
that rule the wild. The bulls of the musk oxen
patrol their herds in a shaggy and truculent circle,
outside of which their outlaws, outlaws by age or
ill temper, are pulled down by their ancient
enemies. Across the flat country a swan's nest
marks bay and point. Here the mother bird
hatches her young, while the husband hies to the

THE CYCLE OF THE NORTH 133

congregation of males, meeting daily where the
food is good. The conclave is that of a club,
severely masculine, and the lords of many nests
commune noisily together. To the club also,
may come the mother, should her mate be killed,
to choose another spouse ; but only for this
intimate and selective purpose is her approach
permitted. Coastwise, range packs of white foxes,
defenceless singly, but invincible together, and
the grey wolves hunt the polar bear, surrounding
him with a ring of snapping jaws, when the salt
mud sinks under his feet at low tide.

Then, as the year fattens, comes the physical
change, and fur and feather, worn, matted and
broken, are put away for the new covering that
grows before the autumn closes. The swans
cluster in solitary places to moult, places where
there are periwinkles and clams and crabs and
berries for the taking. The caribou move slowly
with patches of new hair spreading on their multi-
coloured flanks. Everywhere there is an easing
and slackening of the eternal war. Carcajou, the
wolverine, is too lazy to steal, and eats dead fish,
and the white bears drowse in the languid heat.

134 THE CYCLE OF THE NORTH

In September there is a quickening of wild
blood. From lonely places the fat moulting birds
begin to waddle toward the coast. There is a
touch of frost at night, and all plants and fruits
fling themselves out with ultimate and prodigal
profusion. In the north the caribou does turn
with their young and begin to trot south with the
sound of a multitude of clicking hoofs and horns,
for they do not shed their antlers like the bucks.
Then also small tribes that neither hibernate nor
eat moss, the rats and beaver and squirrels, replenish
their stores.

Gradually the salt water edges become peopled
with travellers preparing for that most wonderful
journey in the world. Mallard, widgeon, teal,
plover, geese, swans, all the broad and narrow
billed brotherhood assembles. Night and day the
tumult of them ascends. There is eating of sand
for digestion, and digging of shellfish to harden
muscles softened by the sweet things of the plains ;
for it is common knowledge that there will be no
more sea food till they sight the swamps of the
Gulf of Mexico. The air is black with trial
flights of young birds trying the strength of

THE CYCLE OF THE NORTH 135

young pinions, coming back to earth with calls
and whistles and quacking and trumpeting. Old
birds, strong of wing and weatherwise, mount to
invisible spaces looking for that whisper of the
north they all await, till as the autumn days of
Indian summer pass, the colonies grow strong and
clean and confident.

And then, of a sudden, there is stillness in the
air and a grey sky, and with a few white flakes
the word of the mysterious north has come. A
crisping of the shallow pools and the ducks climb
circling into a slender wedge, with the wisest and
strongest at the point of it. In two hours the
shores are desolate of ducks, for they have far
to travel and must start betimes. And so the
marvellous procession marshalls its appointed order
with the wisdom that lies behind the flat skulls
and beady eyes of winged things. As they come
they go. The weaker ones first who must stay
and rest often by the way and brave innumerable
dangers in their short journeys, till only are left
the swans, whose single flight can be a thousand
miles, who seek the high altitudes where the air
is thin. Then, when the swans have gone, the

136 THE CYCLE OF THE NORTH

royal eagles throb down from the Arctic in lonely
passage along deserted leagues, and when the eagles
have sped there is silence on the coasts.

Little by little the ice forms. Lakes narrow.
Headland joins to headland. The male white
bears follow out, fishing for seals and walrus.
Wood buffalo and musk oxen seek shelter in
the land of little sticks, and only the coast caribou
and bigger wolves brave the open. The barren
ground bear hides himself in warmth and sleep
and carcajou finds a deserted foxhole.

Then comes the snow, light, impalpable and
fine like star dust, and behind it the first breathing
of that north wind that searches the plain for
months. The land tightens, shrinks and hardens.
Its rugged ridges are smoothed out in soft curves
that swim into each other. Day is obliterated in
the half light of a sun that seems a stranger in
these regions of death, till with relentless force
and swiftness rises the steady drone of the wind.
Winter has come to the barren lands.

THE REVENGE OF PINNE

This ts the story of Pinne,

Told In the northern land,
When the great aurora flickers

Its marvellous violet band,
And the brown and wistful people

Hear it and understand.

In the midst oj the pointed teepees
The puttering campjires burn,

In whose coals the Saulteaux maidens
The tale of their loves discern,

And around the listening circle
Their dark eyesjlash and turn.

THE REVENGE OF PINNE

PEDOAN was a Wood Cree and lived on the edge
of the Company's ground at Fort Chippeweyan,
this being by mercy of Dougall MacTavish, the
factor. The latter saw him there when he came
to open the Post, and, being of an easy temper,
left the cabin as he found it. Nor had
MacTavish reason to repent; for, when the
Dogribs came up from the south and the Yellow
Knives dropped in with marten from the northern
rivers, it was Pedoan who did the talking for
the factor, and the H. B. C. did not lose thereby.
Pinne, the Partridge, the wife of Pedoan,
was old and toothless, but her brown arms were
strong like steel cables, and she could set a
snare with the best of trappers. There remains
then their daughter Tibikuk, the Night, who
moved and spoke softly, and whose dark eyes
and beauty were known from the McKenzie
River to James Bay.

139

140 THE REVENGE OF PINNE

Now it happened that a Personage, very
important in the eyes of the Company, had
completed a journey of exaggerated dangers
and had begged that his two Saulteaux canoe
men might find places as servants of the Company,
and it will, of course, be understood that in the
North there is only one Company. So the
Commissioner nodded and dictated a letter to
the factor at Fort Chippeweyan, and, as a result,
Ahjeek the Otter, and Gheezis the Sun, got
into a canoe on Lake Winnipeg and started north.
Ahjeek was short and broad and had a bull-like
neck, and when he swung a tump line over his
head the sinews on his neck stood out like wire
ropes and were just about as tough. Also he
had a large flat nose, and a scar on his left cheek
that he came by not in the paths of honesty.
Gheezis, on the contrary, was thin and very
supple, so that when he walked he seemed to
melt into all kinds of curves as if he had no
bones. His eyes were very black and quick, and
one of them crossed the other so that he could
look at two men at once, and neither could tell
which he regarded. As to wrists and hands

141

he was very delicate and particular, and no one
ever saw the hands of Gheezis to be dirty.

The two came to Fort Chippeweyan by way
of Lake Winnipeg and the Athabasca, and when
they reported to MacTavish he spoke of the
Company as no factor is supposed to speak, for
he saw further into their hearts than did the
important Personage whom they had piloted
through gentle dangers. But they were quiet
and peaceable, so he had no word against them.

It fell on a day in springtime that Pedoan
returned from his hunting, and Ahjeek saw
Tibikuk standing by the door of the cabin.
Immediately his heart began to beat and his
eyes to get red and the sinews on his neck stood
out, for he desired her greatly for his wife. But
Tibikuk went in and shut the door as if she
had not seen him. So all morning he thought
and all afternoon he brooded, till evening came
and with it came Gheezis.

Ahjeek looked at him and said slowly : "I
have seen a girl, and, to-night, I ask for her."

Gheezis did not answer. He kept on humming
the Song of the Black Swan, the one that Peguis

142 THE REVENGE OF PINNE

wrote just before he died, and presently, lighting
his pipe, he laughed at Ahjeek through the
smoke.

The other looked at him, but could not tell
which eye he was using, till, after a little,
Gheezis said, "Has the girl no name that you
speak it not ? " and laughed again.

Ahjeek did not understand the laugh, but
replied "It is Tibikuk; the daughter of Pedoan."

Then Gheezis continued to laugh ; but it was
strange and hard, and his gaze had turned cold
like the water in a hole through the ice. " My
brother sleeps like the bear in winter," he
sneered. " Long ago I had chosen Tibikuk for
myself, and to-night I, Gheezis, speak to Pedoan."

There was silence for a moment and Ahjeek
took his skinning knife from his belt, with a
piece of the smooth stone that lies on the south side
of Great Bear Lake, and began to sharpen it
till his eyes got red with staring at Gheezis.
The thin man never stirred but filled his pipe
again and kept on with the song of the Black
Swan. His gaze was turned to Ahjeek, but one
could not tell whether hate or laughter was in it.

THE REVENGE OF PINNE 143

While he was still smoking the other threw
away the stone, and, slipping his finger along
the edge, jumped up and said, u What was
the word my brother had about Tibikuk ? "

Gheezis looked at him and smiled. " The word
was that a woman is not worth a man's blood,
and we will not fight about one — you and I."

Then Ahjeek crouched low and guarded his
breast with the point of the knife. " If you
will not fight you will die, and then women
will not concern you any more; but Tibikuk
and I will speak of you sometimes," he added
savagely.

Gheezis winked quickly and gazed at him first
with one eye and then the other, so that his
glance was like the summer lightning — also he
knew that if Ahjeek killed on the Company's
ground his punishment was very certain. " Then
I am to go the way the white man went on the
little island in Lake Winnipeg," he said thought-
fully. "Now that I remember it, he was found
with his face down and a hole between his
shoulders — and his knife was very like yours,
Ahjeek. I could almost think it was the same

144 THE REVENGE OF PINNE

knife. If I talked in my sleep I might talk about
that Englishman."

Ahjeek's mouth opened, and, dropping the
knife, his small red eyes fixed themselves on
Gheezis, who stooped to snatch it up and drawled
as he examined it :

"See — the handle is the same, and it is marked
with the name of the place where the white
mother lives across the big sea water. It is a
good knife — Ahjeek."

Trembling hands were plucking at his knees.
"Kago, Kago, do not say it. It is death for me."

" It was death for the white man," said
Gheezis, with his cold flinty smile, "Is my
brother now of any mind about Tibikuk ? Would
he speak to Pedoan to-night ? "

But Ahjeek had suddenly lost all desire for
Tibikuk, so it came that Gheezis darkened the
doorstep of the cabin that same evening. Now,
suitors had come by snowshoe and canoe from far
places to seek the maid Tibikuk, but Pedoan's
wrath and selfishness had always driven them
away unsatisfied. Thus, when Gheezis stated his
case and cast his crooked eyes on the girl, Pedoan,

THE REVENGE OF PINNE 145

guessing aright what manner of man he was,
became silent from very fury.

But the suitor still wore that little smile and it
broadened as he laid out his gifts; flannel for
Pinne, a caddy of tobacco and a bag of powder
for Pedoan, and, for Tibikuk, beads and printed
cotton and a red silk shawl, and such ornaments as
had shone to her envy for months in the glass
case in the corner of MacTavish's store.

"It is well that I should know of you before I
speak," snapped Pedoan, oblivious to this array.
" Who is your father ? "

Gheezis hesitated. It was an awkward ques-
tion, for his father had wandered down into
Minnesota, and choked out his life with a bullet
in his throat as he was crawling through a
settler's window. "My father is a chief and
hunts on the Peace River," he said sulkily.

" And you — who are you ? "

Tibikuk looked up quickly and for a moment
her soft eyes rested on the face of Gheezis.
There was something inscrutable in the glance,
but to her suitor it expressed many things. " I
serve the Company here and on the Moose

146 THE REVENGE OF PINNE

River," he said, all the time drinking in the girl's
smooth, oval features, the supple brown shoulder,
the rich curves of neck and bosom.

Pedoan caught the glance and his wrath burst
like a storm. "All this may be true," he hissed,
"but I feel that you are a liar." Then, kicking
the gifts, he snarled : "The time is not yet when
my daughter shall lie with a Saulteau. The Crees
do not wed with dogs — begone, and take your
gifts with you."

Tibikuk leaned a little toward her suitor. So
many had spoken and offered gifts and then gone.
So many evenings she had sat silent while her
parents talked, that a mute revolt was at last
stirring within her. Love comes quickly among
the red people of the north, even as the seasons
and death ; and now there was something in her
breast that answered to the voice of Gheezis.

He saw it, and the fire in him burned the
fiercer. But the ancestors of Gheezis had been
crafty tricksters all, so, although his passion
flamed, the cold, cool mind of him asserted itself
and he knew that he could bide his time.

"Is this my father's last word?" he said quietly.

THE REVENGE OF PINNE 147

" Pedoan speaks but once," flashed back the
old man.

Then Gheezis got up, shooting a glance at
Tibikuk, and bowing very politely to her mother.
"It will not be the last word till I have spoken,"
he replied meaningly at the door of the cabin,
and left his gifts behind him.

With no surprise, he saw, next morning, that
the house of Pedoan was empty, for, having
enough of Gheezis, the interpreter had slipped off
to Lac Clair to hunt moose in the Birch Lake
country. And, noting this, Gheezis sat long and
silently, puffing smoke from his immoveable face,
while plot after plot and plan after plan moved
through the darkness of his mind. All day he
sat, till, with evening, his sullen visage cleared,
and, slouching over to the Post, he asked
MacTavish for a week's holiday for Ahjeek and
himself.

The factor looked hard at the evil eyes, for
suspicion had shrouded the man like a cloak, but,
in the end, glad to be rid of him for a space, the
leave was granted.

Then Gheezis spoke to Ahjeek. " Pedoan has

148 THE REVENGE OF PINNE

called me a dog, and kicked my gifts, and I go to
have more talk with him. So do you come too."

Ahjeek grinned. " Your courting was short ;
the girl wants a better man."

The other stared at him, gazing first into the
broad scarred face, then at the skinning knife.
No word was spoken, but, so intense was the
stare that Ahjeek's hand crept to the knife and,
the instant his brown fingers touched its haft
he remembered the Englishman ; then he knew
what the stare meant. Gheezis saw that he
knew. " You come too," he repeated, with a
lift in his voice.

uYes," replied Ahjeek slowly, "I come."

Next morning he thought hard as the foam
began to whisper, and the canoe turned, not
westward toward the narrows that lead to Lac
Clair, but eastward to the broad entrance of the
Slave river. All day he thought, saying nothing,
even though the manner of their journey was
like no othel journey he ever made, for they
dawdled down the broad stream, staying to talk
with everyone whom Gheezis told that they were
going north, even as far as the bitter water.

THE REVENGE OF PINNE 149

When night came he would have no fire but
sat by himself humming the Song of Peguis.
Then, when it was dark, picking up his paddle,
he motioned to Ahjeek to take the bow.

"Where do we go? " said the big man angrily,
being tired of this nonsense.

" To see my father-in-law," said Gheezis grimly.
Ahjeek shivered a little, not that the night was
cold, but because he saw death in the eyes of
his friend. So all through the darkness they
paddled hard against the stream, passed the post
ere morning, and, heading for the narrows, left
the canoe there.

It was a hard trip on foot through the dead
timber, and they made no fire on the way, but,
on the second morning, Gheezis peered across a
patch of smooth water as he lay on his belly in
the long grass. Opposite, where the green forest
marched down to a strip of sandy shore, was the
camp to which they had come through the
wilderness like a wolf to his den. His brow
wrinkled and the muscles of his face twitched
as Pinne put her grey head out of the tent and
called to Tibikuk whose lithe figure was moving

150 THE REVENGE OF PINNE

through the trees. But when Pedoan came down
to the shore and put a rifle in his canoe, Gheezis
lay closer in the grass, steadied his elbows on
the ground, and laid one keen eye along the
glinting barrel of his gun. Then he shook his
head and turned to Ahjeek. "It is better to
wait," he said, smiling.

The old man paddled stiffly across the bay to
the mouth of a little river that slipped into it
opposite his camp, while Pinne and Tibikuk
watched him, and, from the long grass the others
watched him too.

Within the hour Pedoan had killed his moose
and sat beside it, smoking. Because he was old
he wondered whether it would be easier to take
the moose to camp or have the women move the
camp to the great rough-coated animal that lay
so motionless on the moss. Then, as the incense
of his pipe ascended and the sunlight chequered
the ground with a myriad of little patches, his
mind turned to Tibikuk and the Saulteau who
had covered the floor of his cabin with gifts — and
this was the last thought of Pedoan.

In the ground hemlock behind him were the

THE REVENGE OF PINNE 151

cross-eyed one and Ahjeek. As he had tracked
the moose, whose hooves left their print in the
soft earth, so had they trailed him; and never
were bear or deer so closely tracked as had been
Pedoan. They had moved like shadows through
the woods. To their beady eyes the soil was a
book of simple reading — here he had rested, for
the butt of the rifle had left a mark and its
muzzle had scratched a tree trunk ; there he had
found the moose track and stopped to think, for
the footprints were deeper. By leaves and twigs
and a thousand faint and almost imperceptible
things, by wisdom of the forest and the not
understandable faculty of inherited ages, they had
found and followed him to this.

"Under the arm," whispered Gheezis, and
the man with the scarred face pointed his rifle,
he knew not why, at the side of Pedoan. But,
just as his finger crooked to the pull, a vision
swam across the muzzle. It was of a big man,
with yellow hair lying in the grass, who got up
suddenly and looked at him with a world of
reproach in his clear blue eyes. Then he no
more saw Pedoan or anything else, and the barrel

152 THE REVENGE OF PINNE

began to make uncertain little circles in the air,
till the sinewy hand of Gheezis shot silently out
and pulled it down.

He shut his own eyes, but opened them again
just as Gheezis pulled the trigger. The report
was like thunder. Pedoan started suddenly and
his shoulders went up ; then he swayed for a
moment and rolled slowly over on his side, and,
where they hid, they could hear him choking
with the blood in his throat. The two looked
at each other as the echoes rolled out and crashed
back from the bluff side of a great hill that lifted
to the north. Then Gheezis laughed horribly
and, walking over, stood looking down at the
body.

"It is not many days ago," he said, with a chill
triumph in his voice, " that you called me a dog ;
but there is not left now anyone to call me that.
I ask you again for Tibikuk, my father."

The leaves began to rustle in a gentle northerly
wind as he turned to Ahjeek. "I have asked
Pedoan, and you see this time he has not refused
me," he said, with a revolting laugh, "so now I
go to Tibikuk.

THE REVENGE OF PINNE 153

There was still more weight in the wind, when,
at noon, Tibikuk stared under her lifted hand at
a canoe that came across from the little river.
But when the tall, lean figure of Gheezis slouched
up across the sand, her heart began to jump and
she ran to the tent. So it was Pinne who met him.

"I seek Pedoan," he said smoothly.

Tibikuk glanced from behind her mother and
became strangely silent when she met the fire in
the crooked eyes. "Pedoan hunts by the little
river," grunted Pinne, with no joy for this un-
welcome suitor. "He killed this morning and
will be back soon."

"I too have killed," smiled Gheezis. "Bring
the meat," he called to Ahjeek.

So all that afternoon the men smoked and ate
and brought wood and water for Pinne ; and
Gheezis sat beside Tibikuk, and the manner of
his love-making was such that in the girl's breast
began to stir something she had never known
before. He told her of the little bottles with
wires in them that made the light at Winnipeg,
and of the black horse that ate stones and water
and pulled wooden houses on wheels. And, hear-

154 THE REVENGE OF PINNE

ing all this and more, there filtered into Tibikuk's
mind a great longing to see these things with the
crooked-eyed man who knew so much.

The sun dipped till he glared large and red and
round through the tree tops, but still Pedoan came
not. At last Pinne grew fearful and spoke.
" Gheezis, my husband is dead or hurt. Go seek
him by the little river."

Gheezis turned slowly. He had been staring
at the place where Tibikuk's neck smoothed out
into her shoulder in a soft brown curve. He had
seen many women, but desired none till he found
this girl, and the afternoon had been one long
voluptuous anticipation. Now, he had but to put
out his hand and take. The knowledge filled him
with a fierce satisfaction. "Pedoan is a great
hunter, also he is wise," he said diffidently.
"Why should hurt come to him? "

"But there were two shots," pleaded Pinne,
twisting her nervous hands. " The first did not
kill, perhaps not the second."

Gheezis turned his eyes again to Tibikuk.
"Perhaps both killed," he said thoughtfully. "It
is late. I will go to-morrow."

THE REVENGE OF PINNE 155

Pinne glanced down the shore to the canoe,
and Ahjeek, who lay beside it, rolled over on his
elbow and stared at her. He had been there all
day, but she had never realised it till now. Again
she glanced, and, doing so, her heart stopped.
For at the water line, on the yellow bow, was a
brown patch of gum, and its outline was of a
man's face.

She stood and gazed, while her soul trembled
under the waves of cold fear that beat upon it.
It was Pedoan's canoe. She had made the patch.
Slowly her eyes swung round, till they rested on
Gheezis. He was leaning forward and watching
her intently. Then, carelessly, but with her heart
pounding in her shrivelled old breast, she turned
and went into the tent.

At midnight, with the touch of a hand on her
wrist, Tibikuk struggled slowly out of riotous
dreams. It was very dark. Through the tent
she could hear the north wind whipping the
tree tops. The hand crept to her hot lips and
her mother's figure bent over her. At her feet
lay Gheezis and Ahjeek beneath their blankets,
and the sound of their breathing was heavy.

156 THE REVENGE OF PINN&

" You will wake them, my mother," she
whispered through the lean fingers, "What is
it?"

"Your father is dead," breathed Pinne, "and
these men have killed him." The old woman felt
her daughter tremble in the dark. She did not
know that the girl's foot had touched the sleeping
form of Gheezis and that the touch had run
through her like fire. Then, slowly, blind horror
worked into her mind, and, between horror and
passion, she trembled the more.

" I tell you this, that to-morrow you may under-
stand and do what I tell you. Till then be very
still."

All night Tibikuk lay and stared at the ridge-
pole. Pedoan was old when she was born, and
he had kept her close, being the child of his age.
There were no sisters or brothers, nothing but the
stern hunter and his grizzled wife. Tibikuk was
twenty-three. Her bosom was ripe to bursting.
No little hands had ever touched it, and no man
had ever taken her in his arms, but now a strong
one had come and not gone away like all the
others. Again her foot touched him gently, and

THE REVENGE OF PINNE 157

again the fire ran through her. Love is un-
tempered in the North. It is born in the stillness
of the forest, and nourished in the wide sweep of
empty spaces where only the lovers exist, and so
it was that she lay silent with her foot against the
unconscious Gheezis and that delicate fire throb-
bing in her veins.

In the morning the women watched the canoe
dwindle toward the little river, and Pinne, shaken
with fury, dry-lipped for revenge, turned to
her daughter. " Are you mad ? I tell you
Gheezis has killed Pedoan."

"Then why do they search for him?" said
Tibikuk, heavy-eyed and languid.

" Search," replied her mother contemptuously,
" They go to sleep, not to search ; and they
will die in their sleep."

But the girl's soul, trembling with the sudden
fierce upspringing of love, was numb to all else.
Even the thought of her father's death hammered
fruitlessly at her understanding. As in a trance
she heard her mother: "The great spirit spoke
to me in the night, and sent Keewaydin, the
north wind, to help me ; so that we two women,

158 THE REVENGE OF PINNE

without arms, will go and kill two armed men.
Look ! "

Tibikuk looked and saw the canoe vanish into
the little river. The lake was white with foam,
and through the dead timber droned the weight
of a great wind. Suddenly her mother's arms
closed about her neck. " Tibikuk, my little one,
will you let your mother go alone ? " She tore
open her cotton dress, "See the breast that fed
you ! It is all dried up. Is your love dried
up too? I have carried you so many miles,
Tibikuk. In the year of the great hunger, I carried
you from the Moose River to Fort Rae, and
often Pedoan carried us both. It is your mother
that speaks, Tibikuk ! "

Slowly the girl's eyes raised till they met the
distorted face of Pinne. It was transformed into
an epitome of suffering, and at the sight, memory
moved in her daughter. Little half-forgotten
happenings crept into her brain, some of the
thousand nameless things that dwell even in
savage breasts. In the light of these she saw
the past, till, seeing it, the wonderful future
became dim and shadowy. Then her soul shook

THE REVENGE OF PINNE 159

at a vision of Gheezis, but the vision changed
as he raised a rifle, pointing it at her father.
Then the rifle spoke, and she shut her eyes, and
trembled. " I will come, my mother, I will come."
Together they skirted the shore, moving
quietly and smoothly as Gheezis himself had
done. First there had been the hunter, then
those that trailed him, and now, lastly, the women
crept on the way of death. Up the little stream,
by the big bluff, they found Pedoan's canoe,
with the brown patch on its bow, and, at the
sight, Pinne kissed the smooth bark, with the
tears trickling down her face. They left it with
the paddles placed very carefully, and its stem
pointing down the narrow line of black water
that slipped out of sight in the dead timber.
Then upstream to the bluff, and here Pinne said :
" The great Spirit spoke truth and Keewaydin
is very strong. Here are the little firesticks
from the Post." She pushed a box of matches
into Tibikuk's hand. "The men sleep, one
on each side of the river, the men that killed
Pedoan. Your father did not know why he
died and these men will die in their sleep."

160 THE REVENGE OF PINNE

Tibikuk stood motionless, her eyes rounded with
fear; till her mother spoke again. "You will
go west and I will go east, and on the way
back we will come very quickly and make fire
in many places, as the Spirit told me. Go
quickly, my daughter."

She turned and vanished. For an instant
the girl stood, and then she too disappeared. The
moments passed. An otter slid noiselessly down
stream, and, back in the underbush an animal
pressed by with a breaking of small sticks.
Suddenly, to east and west, sprang up small
puffs of light grey smoke, and in the distance
sounded a faint snapping and crackling. The
film broadened, thrusting up rounded curls that
blew away and grew again with louder and
sharper crackling. The smoke neared the river,
and, just as a light flame flickered at the far
end of it, Tibikuk ran out panting. The fire
was growing in the east and Pinne came
not.

" Mother," called the girl.

The only answer was a new and vicious voice.
She could see wreaths of fire envelope the dead

THE REVENGE OF PINNE 161

birches and blossom out like gigantic torches.
" Mother," she called.

The fire crept nearer and blasts of burning air
struck her in the face. Then she ran in on
her mother's trail. A little way from the river
lay Pinne, her hip broken, her features distorted
with agony. Tibikuk leaned to lift her, but
the old woman shook her head and tried to
smile. " It is the end," she said faintly. " Save
yourself, my little Tibikuk."

There was a world of love in it, and her
daughter's voice broke as she put her head on
the old woman's shoulder. "There is nothing
left, my mother," she said through the smoke
"I will stay."

With a groan Pinne raised herself and stared.
An eddy in the wind had carried the fire north,
and it now turned to sweep down on them.
" You love Gheezis ? " she whispered brokenly.

Tibikuk buried her face against her mother's
breast. " I love him, and I have killed him," she
answered convulsively.

A wave of flame closed down on them and
Pinne turned to beat it out. Then came another

162 THE REVENGE OF PINNE

and another. She gazed down at the brown
head. " My little bird," she said weakly, " my
poor little bird."

The wind pressed from the barren lands ever
more fiercely and drove the blast before it like a
tempest. " Run, my daughter, run quickly,"
stammered Pinne, as the scorched air took her
withered throat. " Run quickly ; Gheezis will
be seeking the canoe."

The girl sprang to her feet. No other words
than these could have snatched her from this
crackling furnace. No power less mighty than
newly wakened love could have drawn her irre-
sistibly from a death that already seemed sweet.
" I go, mother," she gasped, and darted toward
the river bank. She turned once and looked
back. But Pinne lay still, with her dress drawn
over her eyes.

The canoe leaped down the narrow stream to
the lift of the girl's agonised strokes — leaped till
a fringe of lace twinkled out on the black water
under the trembling delicate bow. And, as the
pall overhead mounted ever darker and heavier to
the zenith, Tibikuk's voice rose the louder, with

THE REVENGE OF PINNE 163

calls of birds and animals, flying from the red
death that came apace. "Gheezis," she wailed,
"Gheezis."

But there came no answer. Back in the forest
the fire was striking hard. From the heart of it
came roaring and explosions. The draught of it
sucked up trees and branches and flung them like
flaming arrows through the air. Winged things
soared to escape and were tossed and buffeted,
scorched and seared in its fuming vortex. The
wild populace of the forest fled for refuge not to
be found, fled in a tumbling terror-stricken avalanche
over the bodies of two men, forms that writhed
and stretched and twisted, but never woke to life.
Neither fur nor feather escaped that day, save only
when it reached the cooling depths of the lake, for
there at last the conflagration was stayed. The
moon rose, blinking through the smoke at the
black desolation that marched northward to the
big bluff. The wind had dropped to a whisper.
Halfway across, between the camp ground and
the little river, floated Pedoan's canoe. Tubikuk
leaned weakly on the thwarts, her blank eyes
fixed on the desolation that had engulfed the

164 THE REVENGE OF PINNE

world. For a long time she stayed thus — then
the canoe grounded flatly on the sandy shore.
Dumbly — as one dazed — she got out and tottered
to the camp. The tent door was open, and within
lay the blanket on which Gheezis had slept at her
feet. She cried out once, as one suddenly stricken,
and, throwing herself upon it, buried her face in
its folds.

THE TURNING POINT

If, on its quiet and shadowed way
My spirit Jirst shall slip, to wait

The coming of thine own, I pray
That God will be compassionate :

Nor rob me utterly of sight,

Nor close mine ears, but may I see
Some vision of mine old delight

And hear thee in eternity :

That my unfettered soul may move
Conscious of memories that bless, —

The rare divinity of love,

And thine immortal tenderness.

THE TURNING POINT

HENDRICK'S wife stood for a long time and watched
his departing form swing into the morning mist.
He turned at the gate, as he always did, and, as
on every day, she waved her hand. Then the fog
engulfed him.

There was something in its soft density, in its
impalpable obscurity strongly akin to her own
mood, and it held her motionless. The earth was
very still and in its silence she could detect the
troubled questions of her own heart ; unreasoning,
unjustified, she had told herself a thousand times,
but yet of an insistence that seemed almost im-
mortal. If it were anything else that she feared
her own judgment would have revolted, but that
she should be oppressed by love itself was well
nigh hideous. Like a creature trapped in some
delicate snare she had essayed every affectionate
escape, but ever as she moved toward any ex-
pression of individuality she was swamped by an

167

168 THE TURNING POINT

adoration that left her breathless. She loved,
God knew that she loved, but life seemed to be
bounded by sacrificial altars which her husband
heaped anew with passionate offerings.

She had watched this grow from a bridal wor-
ship into a consuming flame that now almost
choked her with its intensity, and with it grew the
consciousness that her intellectual vitality was
being sapped by the response it demanded.
There were no little voices to answer the question,
indeed in that case there would have been no
question to answer.

As she gazed, the fog lifted and daintily divested
itself of garden and hedge. The horizon widened
into clean beautiful green things, and, with the
enlarging world, her mind suddenly expanded to
a solution. Doubt, misunderstanding, even re-
sentment, it might cost all of these, but she was
ready to pay the price.

Weeks later, during an evening that to Hendrick
at least was full of satisfying nearness, her pent-
up spirit spoke, but there was nothing in the
smooth tones that revealed the voicing of a great
ambition.

THE TURNING POINT 169

"Stephen."

He looked up and something in his grey eyes
made her pause, " Yes, dear."

" I — I want to go to Europe in January with
the Reynolds."

The grey eyes opened wider, "You want to
what?"

"Go to Europe with the Reynolds. I saw
them yesterday," she hastened on, "and they
renewed an invitation made months ago, but I
didn't like to tell you. It sounded too miserably
selfish, and "

Her words trailed out, silenced by a quick
apprehension and the beating of her own heart.
Hendrick stared with a puzzled wistfulness. He
was conscious of a chill that seemed to radiate
from the very presence he so loved, and in
which he was wont to move to his soul's great
content.

It was typical of the man that his answer re-
flected her rather than himself. " How long do
you want to be away, Lois ? "

" Stephen — dear — don't put it like that ; four
months," she added, gazing at him with beseech-

170 THE TURNING POINT

ing eyes. "Husband, I don't want to go unless
you want me to. I know how it must sound ;
but trust me and send me."

At the words, Hendrick, in spite of himself, fell
to thinking how immeasurably she had trusted
him, and they struck him with a strange direct
reasonableness.

He had told her a thousand times of his utter
dependency, he had felt it most in those too rare
moments when she had faintly responded to his
adoration, but now her detachmemt from the
sheltering arms impressed him with a sudden
respect.

"Lois, dear one, of course you can go. I can
just dimly guess what it will all mean to you. I'd
trust you out of this world into the next. You
know you're all I've got."

She was conscious at once of an absolute dis-
solving of his soul in her own. Often and again
she had been burdened with a sense of the lodge-
ment of Hendrick's spirit in her breast, till her
very thoughts were coloured by an unnatural
duality. She had reckoned that her husband
would let her go and had read him truly enough,

THE TURNING POINT 171

but it was fate that the very thing from which she
fled should open the gates.

There was a mingling of eyes, a long inter-
change, even intersearching, of soul, that filled her
with a sudden fear ; then Lois had a glimpse of
herself standing alone, uninfluenced and uncon-
strained, and to the vision her whole nature
mounted in eager response.

She told him what a woman tells to the man
who has displaced all others in her heart by the
sheer weight, not the sheer joyousness, of his love.
Hendrick, with a mind in a riot at her departure,
was nursed through mood and tense by a wise
devotion that never slackened to the hour of Lois
sailing. He was hungry for her and she knew it.
He remembered vividly what even their short
separations had meant to him, he could understand
her longing, but was baffled by her willingness to

g°-

The parting was a loving deception, which how-
ever deceived neither. Hendrick's prospective
loneliness appalled him, but he said nothing ; his
wife's happy visions vanished and she gave no
sign. It was just one of these little domestic

172 THE TURNING POINT

tragedies which were being enacted all around
them, but which they shared for the first sharp
time.

Soon the throb of the vessel awakened her to
a keen perception that seemed to pierce her years
of indecision. She felt suddenly as if the torrent
of her husband's worship had been bridged by
some structure that carried her over its impetuous
flood, and on the other side waited a thousand
new and beautiful things.

The vast empty horizon, the gigantic sweep of
the hard blue sky, the clean wind breathing over
the salty leagues, the cleft waves racing along the
smooth black side, all these inoculated her with
a sense of new existence that was entrancing.
She was so delightfully alive, and, in a way, so
emancipated, that in the very uncertainty of the
future lay its charm. It was like the soaring of a
singing lark into rare and odorous space.

Some suggestion of what it all meant to his
wife, and blind faith at least in her judgment,
sustained Hendrick for the first few days, then
the inflexible demands of his position engulfed
him for a time. It was a work to which he

THE TURNING POINT 173

gave his best, but there had always seemed a
grim irony in the destiny that made him the
superintending engineer of a huge factory. He
called himself the millhand, in spite of gentle
remonstrance. His evident palpable life moved
through a maze of mechanical creatures of his
own contriving. His office was the nerve centre
of the factory. His domain was peopled by
countless diligent machines and vibrated with the
movement of vast powers.

Now he looked to all this for some expression
it had never yielded before ; he sought forget-
fulness of loneliness.

There was something else to which he turned
instinctively, something guarded almost fiercely
from those who knew him best. It was the
consciousness of his almost dual life. One exist-
ence, ostensible and productive, mirrored the man
to his friends — a progressive, active engineer ; the
other revealed a shy, sensitive personality, sub-
jective and imaginative. One part of him gave
orders, bore responsibility, did the work and
comported itself normally and methodically;
the other, and this was to him his active and

174 THE TURNING POINT

real self, was swayed by spiritual emotion and
fragments of his dreams.

The isolation he dreaded closed in. He felt it
in the sudden first distaste of his work. All the
necessary little crudities of it became unbearably
wearisome, more, even repellant, till out of them
arose a strange distrust of his own powers. He
found himself pointless and inefficient. Then,
because his essential faith was shaken, he essayed
his other self.

In the midst of a questioning mood he was
summoned to the power house, where throbbed
the rythmical giants that vitalized the factory.
One of the engines, a huge Corliss, was in-
tractable. She was petted, oiled, rubbed and
polished till her vast smooth limbs shone like
silver. Her foundations groped deep in the
earth, her fly-wheel bisected the place with its
burnished rim, and Hendrick stood studying her
vagaries with his foreman. There were little
questioning pauses that only an engineer could
note — small irregularities that betrayed them-
selves in a flicker on the switchboard. A
thousand horse power was at work, but the

THE TURNING POINT 175

horses were not pulling together. He reviewed
her former ailments as a surgeon does the past
history of a patient, then a forefinger was laid
on a rocking metal block.

"Your trouble is in here, Bob. It's nothing
but valves, dirt in 'em. We all get some-
thing in our valves occasionally, mine need
overhauling now. There, watch her slow down.
Better take them out to-night. I'll come if you
want me."

Bob shook his head with something of relief.
"You needn't come, sir, that's all right." Then,
as they turned to the door he hesitated, and
blurted. "There's something else, Mr Hendrick,

I meant to speak of it before. But " His

words died out in a strange confusion, and
Hendrick looked at him puzzled.

"Well?"

"It's not exactly engines either," he actually
blushed, " we got a man child over at our place
last week, and — and — I want you to godfather
him, if you're agreeable. We named him after
you."

It was all so remote from anything he had

176 THE TURNING POINT

expected, and there was such a moving homeliness
about it, that Hendrick stared, with a sudden rush
of longing in his own heart. But Bob's grime
streaked face was impassive and a pair of steady
grey eyes demanded an answer. His hand went
out and rested on the foreman's shoulder.

"You honour me, Bob — and, I envy you — and
I'll do my best for the lad." Then his palm
collapsed in the grip that took it.

For days his mind was surcharged with ques-
tions that could not be denied, and for the first
unforgettable time doubt entered. His confidence
in himself, his wife, his work, vanished ; and even
aspiration did not move him. The full tide of her
passionate response must ultimately mingle with
his own worship. He had believed this and lived
toward it. Every flight of his restless spirit was
buoyed by it. He knew that his was a love that
must satisfy itself by eye and ear and touch and
caress, and for lack of these the very tissue of life
was consuming in intensity of longing.

Thus her first letter found him. He devoured
it eagerly, rapturously, then with a slow deadening
comprehension that it was not the message he

THE TURNING POINT 177

craved. He did not want such gentle thanks or
photographic details of a delightful trip, but a sign
that no imagination could ever read into these
modulated lines.

Rubbing the thin sheets between his fingers, as
though to extract some fibre of the life that had
inscribed them, he was suddenly whirled into a
revulsion of feeling. He was wrong — by God, he
was all wrong. He was pouring himself out to
one who would never, never see him as he was.
It was a violation of his inmost spirit.

The dull thunder of the factory drifted in
through an opening door and his mind pitched
mechanically on the intractable Corliss. That was
it — adjustment — his own valve motion was out of
order, they both needed adjustment. Then in a
flood of sentimental revolt he wrote :

" I feel that my point of view about our marriage
has been too intense, and may even have made it
hard for you. I have always thought that I was
only half alive unless I was in some way express-
ing my love for you, and wonder that you have
never found me too emotional for a normally
comfortable life. Now that you are not here

M

178 THE TURNING POINT

everything is strangely changed, and I have pent
up within me what I have so long poured out on
you, and honestly, dear, it frightens me. At this
moment I have a dreadful longing for you to pull
my head down on your shoulder, and lavish your-
self upon me as you never have. It will relieve
you to know that I have decided to be more of
the standard husband and reorganize myself for
our mutual benefit. This will take a little time
and its rather a painful process, so it is just as
well you will not be here.

" I am vexed to confess that I have not been able
to do any writing since you left. The springs of
imagination seem to have dried up. Everything
all right here, except one engine that insists on
sulking like its master."

Utter weariness took him and he experienced
illimitable loneliness, such as must some time come
to those whose highest existence is to waste them-
selves on one beloved. The second parting was
worse than the first. He was crushed beneath the
Juggernaut of his own idealism.

It was typical of the man that his mind did not
veer into contemplation of what might have

THE TURNING POINT 179

happened had he married another, nor did he ever
distantly imagine the possibility of seeking
companionship elsewhere. Up to the day of their
meeting his heart had been like some broad, un-
tenanted plain, over which swept the free and
taintless winds of heaven. He had unconsciously
kept himself unspotted, through a certain fine
delicate instinct, and because he vibrated to the
beauty and mystery of life ; and so, through all
the subtle progress and change of mind and body,
there was being stored up within him a flame of
pure and noble passion. Through this he lived
and laboured. It was his vehicle of expression,
his inspiration, his solace, the great and reasonable
reason for everything.

He had not dreamed that it could burden his
wife ; he would never have dreamed it save in the
ghastly loneliness of days that were. Now the
sudden sensing of this unimaginable thing worked
like a dull and creeping poison in his brain.

Weeks later he was walking through the factory
a half hour before the day's end. Every where
desperate haste was visible. Men stood im-
patiently beside machines that marked time to their

180 THE TURNING POINT

own impatience. Vistas opened of power, method
and production. It was all perfect in its own way
and his work was better than himself.

Suddenly the long ranks of incandescent lights
rose and fell again and again from an intense un-
wonted brilliancy to a dull red. The electric
motors varied their speed with them till the room
was full of a vast rythmical palpitation. The
balance of things was gone.

The hands stepped back nervously from their
work and looked after Hendrick, who was running
towards the power house. As he reached it, Bob
dashed in ahead of him.

"Quick, Bob," he shouted, "shut her off."
The foreman jumped at the handle of the steam
valve controlling the racing Corliss, but it would
not turn, the swaying of the engine had jammed it
fast. He pulled desperately, and a quick grayness
mounted into his cheeks !

"Jump, sir, jump, the wheel is going."
Close beside Hendrick the great fly-wheel
flashed through the air, its glistening rim like a
streak of flying silver. Then, in the roar of gather-
ing destruction, came a small voice with a question

THE TURNING POINT 181

to the engineer. Instantaneously there dropped
a calm in the centre of this cyclone and he re-
membered that if the governor chain could be
broken the engine must stop — if not, catastrophe
waited.

He swung toward it a little uncertainly, for he
was a strong man and loved life, then with a
vision of his wife's face, with her name on his lips,
flung himself square across it.

He was borne like a leaf on its sharp surface
back to the clattering valve motion. It tightened
across him, stretched and broke with a sharp snap.
Instantly the safety mechanism clicked into action.
A shudder ran through the whole gigantic frame,
as if blind fury shrank appalled from the sacrifice,
and the speed of the great wheel began to slacken.
Then slowly, with grinding and groaning of
ruptured metal it came to rest.

The boiler valves roared out their pent - up
energy. The factory, plunged suddenly into
darkness, echoed with the sound of running
stumbling feet, and a multitude of men raced into
outer safety. The engine room had dropped into
a strange silence. In the dusk of the winter

182 THE TURNING POINT

evening its gigantic tenant loomed monstrous and
forbidding, and beside it Bob knelt on the floor
over the limp and twisted body of his chief.

Lois and her companions, the Reynolds, raced
through the major portion of Europe in a
breathless American fashion. The journey re-
solved itself into a series of hasty packings and
unpackings, but they finally arrived in Algiers
fortified by having at least been in close proximity
to a number of interesting things.

Beneath the palms of the Hotel Gorgia the
last remnants of her resolve for self-improvement
vanished. The easy carefree acceptance that had
in her friends seemed at first so irresponsible,
became at once the most delightful and natural of
views, and if her mind groped at first for its
fleeting Puritanism she soon lost herself in the
mystery and beauty of a wonderful world. Now,
as ever, the plain uncompromising West yielded
to the spell of the immemorial East.

It was on the knees of the gods that Kingston
should have been at the Gorgia ; Kingston with
his long lank figure, his delicate nervous hands

THE TURNING POINT 183

and inscrutable eyes. There was a strain in him
that answered to the call and involuntarily, once a
year, he deserted his studio and drifted in silent
contentment to Algiers. Something like weari-
ness of the praise of his plutocratic clients seized
him with an annual disgust that would only be
smoothed out in this semi-tropical Nirvana.
There was a restful depth in the atmosphere of
mountain, city and purple sky, to which he turned
with a vast satisfaction. It could always be
depended on, it was always responsive and it never
talked, and this was balm to Kingston.

He surprised himself no less than his friends by
demanding an introduction to Lois, and even felt
a faint thrill of pleasure as he met the timid
inquiry in her brown eyes. She had heard of
Kingston, she had seen his picture in the
Metropolitan, and had dimly wondered at the
quality of mind that could translate such beauty.
Now, meeting him, she saw not so much the
painter himself but his last great work — the grey
walls of the Kasbah, the white tortuous streets of
the ancient city, and behind all the blue haze of
the Atlas hills. In a way it was reasonable that

184

all this should invest him with interest, and that
he should seem the personification of all that this
new strange journey could offer her. He was
different from any man she had ever known. His
character unveiled itself in fragments that seemed
each to suggest something still more characteristic,
and his cynicism, tempered to a needle-point, was
too delicately perfect to wound.

In the Gorgia Gardens she first spoke freely of
herself and he listened with a grave deference
modulated by an elusive twinkle.

"I feel almost wicked to be so happy so far

away from home, and yet "

" Yet what," he said, watching her beneath his
drooping lids.

" Something here seems to literally take hold
of me ; I can't explain."

"That's the way of the East. Of course you
can't explain, the charm would break if you could.
But I don't see any depravity in your happiness."

She laughed and his eye caught something of
the light in her own. "If I may have a guess
you take things too seriously — don't, it spoils
everything."

THE TURNING POINT 185

" For instance," she hazarded.

Her silence was inviting and he drawled on,
"I used to slave and be very serious over it,
but I didn't do good work. People wouldn't buy,
and I don't blame them. Then I realized that
what the world wants is the lighter touch, not
the heavy hand, so I got over all that. As to
pleasure, its much the same thing — some people
work over it, but I don't. And the same thing
applies to the other great occupation."

"Which," she smiled?

"Love," he said slowly.

Lois' mind flashed to Hendrick in his throbbing
factory, and suddenly wondered why she had
never even seen it.

" I would like to know what you think of that ;
since I am happily and safely married," she
added.

He lit a cigarette and watched a ring of smoke
curling into the breathless air: "That is as it
ought to be and I congratulate him, so what I say
doesn't apply to you. I know people, however,
who are so painfully in love that they can't forget
it for a moment. Their friends feel as though

186 THE TURNING POINT

they were in some hallowed presence and had
forgotten to rub their spiritual feet on an ethereal
mat. Now I call that positively indecent ; besides,
it is fatal to individuality, it is too absorptive."

Lois stared at the flannel clothed oracle whose
careless shaft had sped so straight.

"But some people are made like that," she
said, in faint feminine confusion ; and then, nerved
by some swift instinct of protection, "When its
real it is beautiful."

"It may be. Not knowing, can't say, but
extremity of devotion ought to be kept at home
in a cupboard and only taken out occasionally.
When a man has a seizure like that, only one
woman is beautiful, not all, and it is not fair to
the sex. Where would your poets and painters
come in if they concentrated like that? Think
it over."

She did think it over, and through her thoughts
moved also Kingston's figure. It seemed impossible
for him to be serious, but his quizzical humour
was touched with a wide experience.

Hendrick's letter came, a potent reminder of
actualities. Why should he speed her holiday

THE TURNING POINT 187

and then cloud it with the tale of his own loneli-
ness? His attitude, if not his words, condemned
her absence, and it filled her with a mute resent-
ment. He might at least have waited until he
had found himself. All through the letter ran
the suggestion that he had given more than he
had received. This roused her, till, into her
wounded heart filtered a slow understanding.
He had come to the turning in the road that
she had longed for, but more quickly than she
had ever dreamed.

This almost too sudden fruition of her plan
filled her with uncertainty of her own powers.
Had she dropped a staff to take a reed herself
to lean upon? Then suddenly conscious of the
nearness and beauty of the new life, she kissed
the letter. "I am so sorry, dear," she whispered,
"but oh! so thankful."

She was never so much in love with life as at
that moment. She could not trust herself to
answer it yet, and it lay in her bosom like a
passport to a new world.

The next day Kingston did, for him, a very
unusual thing, and headed a luncheon party to the

188 THE TURNING POINT

Kasbah. When the rest of her friends had dis-
appeared into the grey ramparts, he stretched
himself at Lois' feet. There was something about
his loose-jointed ease that fitted into her relaxing
mind. Life had changed greatly in the last few
hours, and he seemed to typify the diverse interest
that awaited her.

For a long time neither spoke. There was
much indeed that spoke to them, for below and
beyond an exquisite world smiled up breathing a
sharp sensuous beauty.

Then Kingston's voice came in, slow, even and
uncoloured. He told her of his own life, of his
placid, if youthful, defiance of a moribund school
of painting, of his sudden success and subsequent
prosperity. Through it all he seemed to have
won out by independent diffidence. He knew
many men and most places. He had wandered
everywhere, care-free and casual, and, as Lois
listened, she heard unfolded the intimate things
that lie behind common knowledge. More than
anything his quaint individuality held her. He
detached himself gracefully from stress or strain
and looked down with humourous cynicism on a

THE TURNING POINT 189

toiling world — and yet his chief characteristic was
brains.

Lois found herself envying him these things for
Hendrick. She had the feminine attribute of
imagining possibilities where none existed, and,
like many wives, credited her husband with latent
powers that only awaited their appointed time.
Kingston, wise, witty and restful, with the world
at his feet, because he had dared to despise it,
lounged at the goal to which her husband must win.

Over her reverie came the African twilight,
and the dusk brought them to the cactus guarded
gates of the Gorgia. As she turned to thank
Kingston for his escort, a boy ran up with a
telegram, and handed it to her. With a sudden
tightening of the heart she tore it open and read :

"Hendrick seriously injured. Outcome doubt-
ful. Return at once. United Manufacturing."

She stood motionless for a time and then raised
a white face to Kingston. Her eyes were pitiful
with a dumb stricken terror, and she held the
message out to him helplessly.

"Poor little girl," he said softly, "Poor little
girl."

190 THE TURNING POINT

She remembered but little of the next hours
save that in the flash of this lightning stroke was
born a strange and consuming love of her
husband. She felt her soul awake. A thousand
unheeded happenings sprang into precious reality
of meaning and she recoiled from the thought of
herself.

Kingston quickly changed to the man of action.
He found the sailing of the Messagerie boat,
which was the same evening. He secured places
on the Paris train, and telegraphed for a berth on
the Harmonic, which it was just possible to catch.

Lois moved blindly through all the hurry of
departure. A horrible sense of distance crushed
her. The Mediterranean slid slowly by;
Marseilles vanished in a blur of yellow light,
Paris was a succession of long streets between
two stations, and then at last the Harmonic
thrust her sharp bows out of Havre Harbour.

She was conscious of nothing but a dreadful
desire to get to him. The horizon mocked her,
and over the gray blankness of the sea came
memories, insistent, searching and not to be
denied. She began dimly to see that Hendrick's

THE TURNING POINT 191

passionate abandonment of worship had raised
him to spiritual heights that few men ever reach.
That he was drunk with the beauty and mystery
of love, and that she had unconsciously fed on
this, even though some lesser part of her nature
had rebelled. In dire uncertainty she felt a
sickening remorse at having coveted for him
attributes she did not think he possessed. Now,
she prayed to enter again into his life, not as
before, but entirely trusting and thankful.

Wireless messages told her he was fighting for
life ; they could not in fairness tell her more.
She did not know the nature of his accident.
The vast forces of which he spoke so lightly had
seemed too subdued to threaten him. Then, as
the end of the voyage approached, the bulletins
grew less hopeful and she shrank at the thought
that this might be in preparation for the end.

The ocean narrowed to a bay and with the
pilot came one of the partners of the United
Manufacturing Co., a cheery, middle-aged man
for whom Hendrick had entertained a great
respect.

He took her hand in a gentle, almost affection-

192 THE TURNING POINT

ate grasp, and, in the short hour that was left, told
her all. He told it as a father might of his son,
and as the ship slowly passed up the Jersey shore,
he pointed to the tall stacks and vast bulk of his
factory.

"There are a hundred men there who daily
thank him for their lives."

Lois looked and shuddered. She could not
speak. As they drove to the hospital something
in her brain was hammering, " He lives, he lives —
he must live," and as she ran up the steps, Bob
stumbled out.

The big man's face was distorted and his eyes
were red. His head went up at sight of her
and his great hands closed over her own.

"God help you, Mum. I can't stand for it.
I'm going home to my woman."

The simple phrase cut deep to a heart already
well nigh broken; that was what her husband
had been wanting to do. Then she was taken
to his room and stopped panting at a closed
door. Some one opened it and she faced a
screen. The room was in a half light and the
penetrating hospital odour was everywhere.

THE TURNING POINT 193

From behind the screen came the babble of a
thin voice that rose and fell and continued cease-
lessly and called. "Yes, Yes. Good-bye, Lois.
Valve motion, Bob, dirt in it, nothing else: we
all get dirt in our valves. You're too fond of
No. 3, Bob; it isn't good for either of you.
Everybody get readjusted."

His brain ran wild and poured out a medley of
pitiful images in a high querulous note.

A nurse's hand motioned and Lois stood beside
him. The wreck of his broad strong figure flung
itself restlessly across the bed. His face was
unmarked, but the unseeing eyes that met hers
were dreadfully bright, they seemed to belong to
the shadow of a man — this was her husband.

A blinding wave swept over hs- and she looked
imploringly at the nurse who nodded in a depth
of sympathy. Then she flung herself beside the
bed and drew him to her heart.

At the touch he drifted into a strange calm
and lay with blank eyes gazing up into her own,
as if wondering why any one should hold him
thus. Then her face bent close against his own
and her soul spoke through trembling lips. " My

194 THE TURNING POINT

husband, can you hear me? I want you, come
back to me; I want you, come back, beloved."

The world stood still for a moment to watch
the miracle of love. As the infinite pleading in
her voice reached down through the tortured
channels of his brain, the spirit heard and knew.
Amid the shadows it vibrated to the one chord
that was deathless. The mysterious process of
his transition thrilled and halted at this divine
infusion. His wife's arms held him closer, and
reason slowly won her way back to the empty
throne. The tense body relaxed in her embrace,
the fire softened in his eyes and the tired lids
fluttered and dropped softly down. He sighed
once, like a weary child, and then lay still with
his head at last upon her breast.

An eternity sped by, but she dared not move.
Then a hand was laid gently on her shoulder, and
she looked up to see the Doctor. He was
smiling.

THE MANITOU MAIL

Bit of canvas, strap of leather,
Lock to hold the two together ;
Big " R.M." in stencil stamped
Where the shapeless thing is clamped.
Ends and corners frayed to rags,
Thrust in sacks and dunnage bags ;
Bent or doubled, long or short,
Rammed beneath the springing thwart
That the brown canoe-men grip
'Twixt a curving thigh and hip :
Flattened 'neath toboggan thong,
When the winter ways are long,
And the half-breed^ s tireless tramp
Smashes down the trail to camp.

Thus and thus the mail sack goes,
Through the rapids, through the snows
Limp and worn, but strong to bless,
In the waiting wilderness ;
Patched, but potent with the speech
Of stricken people — out of reach.

THE MANITOU MAIL

IF you take a pair of compasses and drop one
leg into the northern end of Little Manitou Lake,
and swing the other in a hundred and twenty
mile circle, the curve will strike the Morning
Star Mine, at least, it would a few years
ago. To-day it will still strike the Morning Star
— but the water is clucking contemptuously at
the shaft mouth, and the grass has spread over
a deserted dump. But when Strong started
south on the twentieth day of one April, to be
exact, he wondered if it were a glorified mint
that waited him at the other side of the long
stretch of rotten ice.

A small syndicate, of odorous reputation, was
in control of the Star ; and, strange to relate,
dividends, large and lusty, were being regularly
paid. Also there was a merchant, a transparently
reputable merchant, who flung his wisdom to the
winds and absorbed Morning Star shares with

197

198 THE MANITOU MAIL

reckless enthusiasm as fast as they were astutely
released by the Syndicate. There are various
frenzies of hate, passion, jealousy and love, but
these fade into pallor beside the gambling furor
which periodically seizes the Lord's elect. And
when there is added to this the subtle psycho-
logical argument that it is new wealth which
the distant jewellery shop is adding to the world,
— wealth which impoverishes none but enriches
all — you immediately have exactly such a situa-
tion as that which resulted in John Strong, under-
taking to do what no man has done either before
or since.

Pride brought him there, also a certain
contempt for danger — the sort of indifference
one has after meeting the same man day after
day in the same place. It was beyond human
nature to listen unmoved to the entreaties of
that transparent merchant, who, suddenly
roused by Strong's half concealed incredulity,
began to wonder whether after all the "jewellery
shop," was really as he had pictured it. He
had pawed at Strong, offering huge fees for
inside information. And Strong laughed, and

THE MANITOU MAIL 199

to finish the thing, said, " It will cost you
five hundred." And then he stopped laughing,
for a cheque with the still wet signature was
shoved impatiently in front of him. All this
and a good deal more passed through his mind
as he faced south, with Tom Moore and the
dog team behind him.

The snow had already left the land that
paralleled him with low black slopes, and shore-
ward on either side lay the blank plain of
ice. The air was cool, but not cold. It was
full of elusive suggestions of Spring — suggestions
apart from temperature or season. Tom Moore
shook his head. "Kahween nesheshin ! " (No
good !), he grunted.

By night of the second day the caravan had
covered seventy miles, and camped in a spruce
thicket beside the Royal Mail. The carriers
were held up — not themselves, but the mail.
Personal chances are inviting and pardonable ;
but orders from Ottawa are flat, so the two
lean weather-beaten carriers waited the widening
of a water lane that already stretched like a black
ribbon down the long backbone of Big Manitou.

200 THE MANITOU MAIL

That night the stars were soft and tremulous,
hanging like melting candles in the vast sweep
of the sky. Toward morning the wind came
out of the south, and the moon was obscured
in soft vapours — and again Tom Moore shook his
head. An hour after Strong left, he looked back.
The carriers had watched him start. No words
were spoken, for in the woods there is small
need of words. But, looking back, he saw two
small pin points move slowly out from shore.
The carriers were trying it.

Now, of that particular day, Strong remembers
chiefly that it was like tramping over a large
and spongy counterpane. The sun came up
hot and clear. By noon the ice was shrinking,
leaving great areas of fine needle-like points
that cut the dogs' feet cruelly, and through
which he splashed with his heart in his mouth.
They skirted long air holes in which the water
lay with that peculiar flat viscosity that water
always takes when surrounded by ice. By
mid-afternoon the trail was red with the dogs'
butchered feet, so Tom cut the traces and they
struggled ashore, and for hours followed the

THE MANITOU MAIL 201

fringe of forest, howling and yelping like lost
spirits.

Nightfall came at Pickerel Rapids, where the
Big Manitou drops into the Rainy River region.
But there was a touch of frost at sundown,
and Strong was too wise to sleep. At noon
on the next day he picked up the rumble of
the Morning Star stamp mill, which, as you
will doubtless have reckoned, makes one hundred
and twenty miles of bad footing, in exactly three
days and a half.

There are various ways of inspecting a gold
mine. There is the directors' inspection, when
augustly ignorant personages smoke cigars in
forbidden places, wonder why a stamp mill
makes such a row, and peer dubiously up into
cavernous stopes, in constant dread that a sudden
contraction of the bowels of outraged earth will
crush them out of recognition. There is the
formal inspection by the mining expert, whose
uncle has an interest in a smelter and wears
a pin of quartz showing native gold. And there
is that entirely different quality of inspection,
when a quiet, grey-eyed, silent man drops in

202 THE MANITOU MAIL

suddenly from impassable regions, and, ignoring
the mechanical triumphs of the mill, demands
admission underground.

That was what Sharpe, the Manager of the
Morning Star, felt, when he faced Strong. The
Engineer was not a big man — he was under
six feet, but he had an enormous width of
shoulder and depth of chest. His arms were
long, his flanks lean : his whole frame seemed
poised for action.

Sharpe glanced past him at the half-breed.
Six-feet-four towered Tom Moore, dwarfing
Strong to insignificance. Only by taking him
sectionally could one grasp his immensity. His
face was seamed and flattened into a huge mask
by exposure to many storms. There was some-
thing saturnine in his eyes. His great hands
hung loose and knotted with ripples and strings
of muscle, the palms and finger tips worn almost
white by friction of the paddle and the pack-
strap. For all his bulk he moved lightly, with
the cat-like tread that pertains to big men of
perfect build. Hardships had only developed
in him that extraordinary strength for which

THE MANITOU MAIL 203

he was noted in the north. He resembled
an engine — infinitely forceful, waiting the master
word.

Sharpe stared at him. He had heard of Tom.

"I represent the holder of a very large number
of shares," went on Strong, quietly. " Here is his
letter, and in his interest I want to go under-
ground."

"You can't," said Sharpe, with a shade of
uncertainty. "It's against orders."

"Whose?"

" The President's."

"I'm sorry; because, you see, we walked a
hundred and twenty miles to see the mine, and
the walking was not very good. So, since the
President's not here, we have to go round his
orders." Strong's voice got quieter and smoother
as he spoke, but there was a thin hard thread
in it. Then Sharpe looked again, and got quite
yellow, for the Engineer's hand rested very lightly
on his hip, and from the hip pocket projected a
hard, angular, and most unmistakable bulge.
Furthermore, Tom Moore, who followed and
understood every word, had his orders, and was

204 THE MANITOU MAIL

leaning slightly forward, staring at the Manager
like a menacing copper basilisk.

There were perhaps fifty men at Sharpe's call,
but he would have felt as helpless with five
hundred. That is the cost of being at heart
a craven. So they walked over to the hoist
house, where Strong instilled a sudden respect
into the hoistman ; and, when he turned to the
head gear, Tom mounted guard at the collar of
the shaft, as Engineer and Manager stood on
the bucket rim and dropped swiftly out of sight.

Now, the tale of that inspection is brief.
Strong tramped through levels that were palpably
barren, and climbed into stopes whence had been
gouged the ore that paid those dazzling dividends.
A burglar had looted the "jewellery shop": that
was patent. Here and there were small lenses
of rich stone, through which the native gold ran
in wires and threads. The output might hold
for a month or two ; but the tale of the Morning
Star was told. He poked about, hammering and
sampling, in grim silence, and Sharpe saw that it
was not a directors' inspection. The Manager's
tricky soul faltered as each section of the Star

THE MANITOU MAIL 205

yielded its barrenness. When it was all over,
Strong swung his sample bags into the bucket
and signalled to hoist, and, as they shot to the
surface, Sharpe's face was white with something
other than candle grease and sludge.

It is the law of the north that friend or foe,
man or beast, must not depart an hungered from
camp ; but when Sharpe struck into the trail for
the dining room, Strong stopped dead. With the
coming of darkness had come also a light frost,
enough to glaze the surface of the sodden earth,
and Strong remembered the shaky leagues that
blinked from the northward.

"Will you eat?" said Sharpe, stiffly, thinking
also, but quite differently, of those shaky leagues.

" With a fool — yes ! with a liar — no ! " snapped
the Engineer, with a sudden riot in his stomach.
"Tom! get the toboggans. Bosin!" (Let us
start.)

And that was Sharpe's last impression of Strong
— a shape vanishing in the gloom, the grating of
the toboggans as they straightened out behind,
and the "weep-weep" of the ice as it sprang
under the invisible feet.

206 THE MANITOU MAIL

At Pickerel Rapids the Big Manitou plunges
into a tortuous stream that wriggles between
steep banks to an ultimate freedom in the expanse
of Clear Water Lake ; and at three in the morning,
Strong rolled himself in a blanket and slept on a
pile of cedar boughs, with the tumult of the rapids
in his ears. At six, in the half light that creeps
before the dawn, Tom Moore arose to make tea.
Strong heard him pushing through the brushwood
to the river's edge.

The woods have their own peculiar language,
which he who walks may interpret — a language
more pregnant with meaning than that of the
most learned professor, and having, furthermore,
sweet and understandable pauses and lapses, in
which the minor elements of the wilderness do
volubly express themselves.

It was in one of the pauses of the river's roar
that Strong heard, sudden and terrible, a whimper-
ing scream of mortal fear — a cry, poignant and
unearthly. He stiffened where he lay, and his
hair crept and prickled on head and neck. Now,
saving the ignorance or cowardice of man, there
is nothing in the woods to fear. This is the first

THE MANITOU MAIL 207

great lesson of woodcraft. But there was a
ghastly horror in the cry that swept away all
else.

Again it rose ; and then a huge body catapulted
toward him with crashing of small timber. Strong's
hand shot out for the axe that lay beside him, and
stiifened for the swing as a great hulk hurtled past
— but, just as the edge was mounting to its fall,
Tom plunged to the earth at his feet. "Wendigo
— Wendigo" (Spirit — Spirit), he quavered, "knock
pail out of my hand ! "

Never before had fear vanquished the heart of
Tom Moore; and, in spite of himself, a quaver
crept into Strong's voice. There were tales by
many an Indian fire of strange things, half-man,
half-beast, that no traveller might meet and live,
emissaries sent by the great Manitou himself to
assert dominion over disputed realms. He laid a
very heavy hand on the big breed's shoulder.
" We will go and see."

At the foot of the cataract a pool widened into
swirling curves. The swift black water was
streaked with mounds and ribbons of curdled
foam, and ringed with a fringe of ice, Above

208 THE MANITOU MAIL

and beyond, a mass of cedar mounted sharply,
muffling the hiss of racing water in its soft green
breast. A remote place, misty and memorial
in the indistinction of dawn, floored with the
ebony river, walled in with undying foliage,
echoing with the booming cataract, roofed with
the ever bending sky — a place for ghosts and
breathless happenings. And that was what
Strong saw; but a great grip took his arm,
and a big, thick, husky voice stammered in
terror, "Neshka! Neshka! ewayde." (Look!
Look ! over there.)

He looked, and a queer dryness came into his
mouth and a weakness to his knees, for a
hummock of foam was drifting toward him, and
from its fleecy surface projected a human hand,
with small milky bubbles clustering around the
wrist like lace.

Then from the smooth and inky water came
forth another hand — another right hand, he
caught that much — and the two touched in silent
salute as they swung past in the rocking cradle of
a back eddy. Round and round, meeting and
greeting, parting and waving, light of finger and

THE MANITOU MAIL 209

swift of motion, plucked suddenly down and as
suddenly reappearing, with ghastly and fantastic
gaiety. A heave of the river, and two disfigured
bodies rolled into view, their scarred faces glinting
at him from just beneath the streaky surface, as
they lolled drunkenly on limp shoulders. " Mail
carriers," whispered Tom. "Break through ice
above Falls — yesterday."

It was the last trip of the Manitou mail. They
had looked Strong in the face, and told him their
orders were to take no risks. It was another
thing to watch Strong's back as he picked a
perilous way over forbidden depths. The man
had over-ruled the mail carrier.

Around swung the grim circuit, and Strong
stooped involuntarily and reached into this dance
of death. Icy fingers slid into his own. He set
his teeth against the strain of the river, tugging
blindly at the shattered forms below. There was
a moment when his heart contracted. He seemed
to be reaching for a spirit that twisted and
struggled grotesquely to escape, a spirit that
pleaded with speechless, bubbling lips: — "Let me
alone ! I won't come back — I won't ! "
o

210 THE MANITOU MAIL

Very tenderly he drew them out and laid them
side by side on a cedar bed in a cleft of the hill,
and raised a barricade against the sharp-nosed
people of the woods that have no fear of man
when he is dead. Beside them he put the things
that one finds in a man's pocket in winter in the
north, and at their feet a hemlock cross, against
the time when the iron-bound earth should soften
to receive her own again. Then he left them to
sweet, inarticulate whispering, and the sound of
many waters.

All next day his mind was charged with vague
and unanswerable questioning. In the silence of
great spaces, the riddle of existence is very
pressing. The hollow sphere of sky is pregnant
with it, the voiceless solitudes hurl it at the
wayfarer, dominantly and insistently. He harked
back to the motionless figures on the cedar bed —
was that the answer ?

As night fell, the end of the Big Manitou
loomed ahead with a black solidity, vastly different
from the trembling sheet he traversed. And
then suddenly came rain — and, behind the rain,
came thunder. Instantly the whole crepitant

THE MANITOU MAIL

plain began to quiver. The shock of the startled
air communicated itself to the dwindling ice.
Great patches of it were fractured and dis-
integrated into soft and spongy areas that shook
and collapsed at every step. Strong began to run
swiftly toward the land — but suddenly his footing
fell away, and, flinging out his arms, he hung
poised and gasping in the chilling flood. Beneath
him was a hundred feet of black water. " Look
out! Don't come here! Bad ice! " he shouted.
But a dark figure loomed through the dusk, as
Tom dropped on his belly and crawled toward
him. The ice swayed and undulated beneath the
weight of the huge breed, who came on with
delicate and infinite caution, till he lay flat and
stretched out his hands. Strong winced as they
closed on him. Slowly the big man put forth his
gigantic strength. Not an inch from its prone-
ness did he raise his own body, that spread out
its diffuse bulk. Through wrist and forearm
alone flowed his vast force, till, as Strong was
slowly drawn backward and sideways, he could
hear bones and sinews cracking like whipcord
under the tension of that stupendous effort.

THE MANITOU MAIL

For a few moments they lay inert, Strong's
teeth chattering, the breed breathing heavily with
deep-lunged reaction. Then the Engineer's hand
went out and found Tom's shoulder.

" Kaygah minowah neebo " (Nearly another
dead one), said Tom, thickly. "Bosin! "

At the head of the Little Manitou there is a
sheltered bay that thrusts close against the main
line of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and here the
camp of the mail carriers nestled on the edge of
a patch of spruce. The wheat trains roared past
it day and night, and between the thunder of
their wheels lisped the voice of the lake along a
smooth strip of shining sand. From the two
cabins two Indian women peered silently day after
day.

It fell on a morning when the Spring sun was
beating down hard, and the woods were full of
the sound of small things wakening to life, that
John Strong and Tom Moore stepped silently from
the screen of tangled spruce. Their clothes were
torn to shreds, their hands and faces scraped and
bleeding — for their trail had been where no trail
was. On Strong's back was strapped the mail

THE MANITOU MAIL 213

bag. Across Tom's forehead lay the wide black
strap of a tump-line, stretched taut with the
mountain of his load. They did not speak ; but
Naqua, the elder of the two women, stared at
Strong with the steady gaze of the forest, till she
caught the leather strap of the mail bag swinging
under his elbow.

Now, in the north, the mail bag is the out-
ward and visible sign of a far distant authority.
It is clothed with dignity and hedged about with
suggestions of power and dominion. It is never
out of sight of the carrier, and is held by him as
something dearer than his honour, and more to be
respected than his own life. So when Naqua saw
her husband's trust borne on strange shoulders,
she stared at it wonderingly, till a dreadful
comprehension began to dawn in her face. "You
have seen my man?" she said, quickly, with a
shake in her voice.

Strong nodded ; words seemed very weak just
then.

" Where is he ? "

" At Pickerel Rapids." His eyes, full of the
burden of his message, caught her own squarely.

THE MANITOU MAIL

There was an instant, a breathless moment, in
which his gaze said insistently: "He is dead —
don't you understand, he is dead " —while hers
thrust back bravely, flouting what it knew to be
true. Then a slow agony rose in the brown
depths — and Strong knew that she had guessed.
"We found them below the Falls," he added,
unsteadily.

And that was all he said. It was only the
lifting of that veil, close to which must walk all
who love and serve the north. It was the
ultimate answer to the unspoken question that
lay heavy in the hearts of the two women, as
often as they watched the Manitou mail dwindle
and vanish in the wilderness. So now that the
grim answer had come at last, it was to spirits
long numbed with waiting and wondering. They
crouched, dry-eyed and piteous, their lips moving
in soundless grief. Then slowly their aprons
were drawn over the bent heads.

Strong stood silent and helpless. He had been
very close to the edge of things, but the memory
of it faded before this epitome of sorrow. Some-
thing moved him to a vast revolt against the

THE MANITOU MAIL 215

inflexibility of fate — the grim cruelty of life.
The roar of a wheat train reached him, and he
turned mechanically into the worn trail that led
from the cabins to the flag station.

But, reaching the edge of the bush, he stopped,
thoughtfully retraced his steps, and stood beside
the shapeless figure of the elder woman. Then,
slowly unscrewing a safety box, he took from it
a strip of pink paper, and pushed it gently
between the brown, clenched fingers. " Give it
to the Hudson Bay factor," he said, in Indian;
"there is enough for two."

An hour later he leaned over the counter in
the telegraph office. "Get this through to
Montreal."

The operator glanced at Strong, but met
something that stifled a pardonable desire for
gossip. Then he read : — u Mine - exhausted-
manager - crooked - take - loss - and-get-out-please-
instruct - bank - accept - endorsement - Naqua - on-
cheque-mad e-payable-to-me- John-Strong."

CONSECRATED GROUND

THE CALL

Turn ye again, my people, turn ;

Enter my palace <wiid and rude.
And cheerly let your camp-fires burn

Throughout my scented solitude.

The glare, the tumult, and the stress
Are gone 'with yesterday, and ive

Are children of the 'wilderness,
Of wonder and of mystery.

Mark how the tilted mountains lie
Mantled with moss and cloistered Jir

My brother, canst thou pass them by,
Art thou not, too, a worshipper ?

The long lake 'wrinkling in the wind,
The breathless 'wood, and, over all,

Through tangled underbrush entwined,
The riot of a 'waterfall.

The multitudinous sounds that blend
In one vast stillness void of sound,

A slumber too divine to end,
Interminable and profound.

Close to the bosom undefiled

Of her 'who bore mankind I press,

Receiving like a wandering child,
Her inarticulate caress.

CONSECRATED GROUND

THE Musselburgh links march beside the Firth
from Eskmouth eastwards, and on the West
the ancient town pulls itself up sharply against
long, green undulations of close, velvety turf.

" Musselborough was a borough when Edinboro was nane,
Musselborough will be a borough when Edinboro's gane."

So ran the old saying, and every time-worn
cobble-paved lane in the old fishing village seemed
to testify to its probable truth.

The mother of Jamie Peters got her fish at
Portobello, packed them in a creel and carried
them four miles to Edinboro. All day her
" Caller herrin " shrilled out, till at dusk she
tramped back six miles to Musselburgh with a
few shillings clinking cheerfully in some remote
receptacle of her short voluminous skirts. But
Jamie's earliest memories were not of fish, they
were of the links. By the time he was three

219

CONSECRATED GROUND

he had learned to keep his eye on the ball. At
the age of five he could follow through and
hit clean, and ere he was nine he was a
caddy.

He started wisely and took golf seriously,
and, as the years passed, soaked in all the
concentrated wisdom of that historic course.
There was something about the sharp click of
a good drive that got into his blood, and when
he saw old Tom Morris tee his ball on his
old-fashioned watch and lift it over the grand-
stand with a full iron swing, golf became
something more than a game or even a
ceremonial.

It was a May day with a west wind whipping
the Firth into life when Jamie left for the
first hole exactly six steps behind the Honourable
John Selkirk. The Honourable John was play-
ing his friend the Bishop of Edinboro, and his
thick-set calves in their coarse home-spun casings
were matched, if not shamed, by the sturdy
shanks that swelled beneath the episcopal
gaiters.

"Ye'll be pullin' this a little I'm thinking,"

CONSECRATED GROUND

said Jamie, thrusting a brassie into the hands
of the Honourable John. "The wind's i' the
west."

But Selkirk did not pull. He sliced — sliced
horribly. His ball leaped the low fence and
lay in a rut by the roadside. "What about
that ? " he said and looked at Jamie.

Jamie was disgusted, more — he was hurt.

"I've seen waur, Sir, but no muckle waur.
We'll take the iron noo."

Some kinder fate smiled on Selkirk. He
lifted the ball with a clean sharp snoop straight
for the green, where it dropped, rolled a foot
or two and lay dead.

"Yon's no so bad," said Jamie, with evident
relief. "The Bishop's i' the bunker."

Selkirk looked back. Angus Edinboro was
engaged in ecclesiastical excavations. His niblick
rose and fell viciously. His black-coated body
was obscured by clouds of sand, through which
could be distinguished a clerical expression devoid
of any appearance of sanctity, "Jamie, I've always
pitied a Bishop because he cannot swear," he
said mirthfully

222 CONSECRATED GROUND

" Wha says that ? Ye've never caddied for
a Bishop. Take the hole. He's picked up."

Half way round the course the Bishop's
serenity was restored, he was one up. " Where's
your son now, Selkirk ? "

There was a moment's pause. Selkirk frowned
slightly, and addressed his ball. It was not
like the Bishop to talk so inopportunely. His
vexation infused itself into the stroke and he
topped his drive.

" Damn — my son's in Canada, somewhere in
the north, and I beg your pardon, Sir."

The Bishop stiffened slightly then relaxed
into a smile, " I'm sorry, Selkirk. It was quite
unpardonable," he said, and drove straight into
another bunker. "I feel inclined to ask you
as a layman to make the appropriate remark,"
he added ruefully.

At the eighth hole, Selkirk was two up and
one to play. He was talking freely about
Canada, and Jamie was close up on his heels,
sucking it in. The mere distances gave him
a queer sensation. Once only had he been as
far as Corstorphine to see the games, twelve

CONSECRATED GROUND

miles of travel in his twenty-five years. Then
Selkirk told about the big trout in the Nepigon
River, that falls into Lake Superior. There
were sea trout in the Esk, where it split
Musselburgh in halves, that is if the over-
flow from the gas works was not too great
and the dye-stuffs from the mills higher up were
not too poisonous. Jamie had whipped the
Esk till he was tired, but this sounded differently.

The Honourable John lost the last hole by

missing a three foot put, but Jamie was too

absorbed in new reflections to care. " Selkirk

was going to Canada to join his son — would he

—would he ? "

" Ye'll no be needin' a caddie ower there,"
he said tentatively an hour later, depositing a
bag of burnished clubs.

Selkirk shook his head with a smile. "No
lad, no ; but would you be leaving Musselburgh ? "

Jamie cast a thoughtful eye about him. To
the west lay the grey club house, its front dotted
with men in bright red coats, southward rose the
bleak grandstand, past which the Musselburgh
races annually ploughed their deliberate course.

CONSECRATED GROUND

Eastward rolled the smooth lift of the links, and
beyond all slept the misty undulations of the
Pentlands. It was all fine, just fine, but he was
suddenly tired of it. "I'll dae anything ye like if
ye'll tak me," he said pleadingly, digging his toe
into the turf, from which crime he would have
shrunk in a normal mood.

Selkirk looked at him seriously ; as it happened
he wanted a man. Jamie would make an
excellent servant, there was no doubt of that,
and his pawkiness had often been balm to
Selkirk's soul. "I'll think it over," he said,
scanning the freckled face. u You'll hear from me
the day after to-morrow."

" F the morn's morn," replied Jamie quickly.

"Yes lad — i' the morn's morn."

Affairs progressed quickly for once in Mid-
lothian. A month later Jamie stood amid a crowd
of second-class passengers, staring at the Lauren-
dans as the Huronic steamed up the Gulf of St
Lawrence. He was trying hard to adjust himself.
He had been travelling for a week and this was
the first time he had reached anything. That, in
itself, was difficult to comprehend. The home

CONSECRATED GROUND 225

ties that promised to be so hard to break, had
slipped from him like his old golfing coat. But
most wonderful of all was the way his mother
took it. Selkirk's letter arrived as promised on
the morn's morn. He read it, swallowed an
unaccustomed lump and turned to his mother,
" Mither, I'm ganging tae America wi' Mr
Selkirk."

His mother was cleaning fish. She finished her
fish, and then stared at him. " When are ye
gangin, lad ? "

"The week's end, forbye it's no sooner."

The fish-wife put down her knife and rubbed
her hard frosty face. A herring scale stuck there
and that was Jamie's best memory of his mother,
with a strange look in her eye and the herring
scale glinting like silver on her cheek. "Wull
ye promise me one thing, Jamie ? "

"I wull, mither."

"If anything haps tae ye, ye'll be burrit in
consecrated ground?"

Jamie fingered the new one-pound Scotch notes
in his pocket, for Selkirk had sent him wherewith
to equip himself. It gave a cheerful sense of
p

CONSECRATED GROUND

independence. Nothing could happen to a man
with sixty shillings in his trews. " Aye, mither, I
promise."

And that was about all there had been to it,
just in the manner of hard, angular people, who,
having depth of affection stowed away somewhere,
would never reveal it, for be it known that the
Scotch may express sentiment for their country,
but rarely for each other.

The Honourable John bore letters to George
Simpson, chief factor of the Hudsons Bay
Company, and while Jamie waited in the big ante-
room at the head office in Montreal, he could
almost have sworn he was back in Scotland again.
From all around came the lift of his native tongue
— the smooth sibilant accents of the Highlander,
the soft inflections of the Lothian lad, the
choleric abruptness of a Glasgow clerk, and the
rasp of the Hebrides. It was a wise man who
ordained that the Scotch should be the back-
bone of the H. B. C., for it has never
broken.

"We will go to Prince Arthur's Landing to
meet my son," said Selkirk, returning from his

CONSECRATED GROUND

interview with the factor, " and then we will fish
the Nepigon."

Now, of that journey and of the pink and red
trout in the icy waters of the Nepigon, is it not
written in Jamie's letters, letters that were
thumbed and borrowed, read and reread, till
something of the fury of the chase filtered into
half the caddies on Musselburgh links. Angus
Edinboro caught something of it when he over-
heard a shock-headed boy mutter scathingly, "A
pound of fush tae an ounce of rod ! Well, ye
ken what Jamie is." But all the time the ancient
Celt was awaking in the wanderer. He was
responding like a questing hound to the call of the
wilderness. Something in him became alive and
he revolted at the prospect of Selkirk's return, at
exchanging cataracts and great spaces and pine-
tossed skyline for the primness of Musselburgh
links and the ordered life of old.

Selkirk was an understanding man. Jamie
admitted that when he stood in front of his
master digging his toe, this time into the moss,
and seeking for words wherewith to excuse
himself. "I'll come if ye say so, Maister

CONSECRATED GROUND

John; but dinna tak me if ye dinna need
me."

" And what would you be doing ? " said
Selkirk, looking at him as he did that day in
Musselburgh, three months ago.

Jamie swung his arm eloquently. Behind him
the river, split by a rocky pinnacle, rushed by in
twin torrents of thunderous foam. All around
him the forest marched to its brink, and the air
was full of sweet tumult and the unfathomed
mystery of untenanted places. "It's yon," he
almost whispered. "It's got me and I would'na
leave it."

There was that in Selkirk which moved in
response. He knew it and felt it too, this call
that summoned so many of his countrymen to
lonely lodges. And Jamie would go like the
rest, till by and by, with an Indian wife, he
would rear a family of the finest men that ever
threaded any wilderness, a family of Scotch half-
breeds. So it came that Selkirk in another month
had another round with the Bishop on the Mussel-
burgh links, while Jamie went north with a party
that headed for Fort Albany on the Hud sons Bay.

CONSECRATED GROUND 229

It was at the end of August that the white
stockade of the Fort faded behind him, as he
stood on the deck of a trading schooner bound
for Fort Churchill, still further north. The
call was getting very clear now. In his quiet
dogged way he was doing his best to answer.
The barren lands stretched ahead, naked and
forlorn — a country sheared of ease and comfort
and delight. And ever as the barrenness in-
creased, Jamie's soul stripped away the shell that
encased it and came forth nakedly to meet it.
The Musselburgh caddy was wiped clean out of
him, he had become the primordial Celt.

Macdougall was in charge on the Albany, and
there was also Suggemah, the Mosquito, an
Ojibway interpreter. Into their circle dropped
Jamie, welcome as the grey goose, herald of
summer in the barren lands. Macdougall held
close to the Kirk, but Suggemah was a heathen.
Evening after evening had the trader hammered
at the inflexible Indian, till by now he was on
the fourth round of arguments that apparently
dissolved in the smoke that shot in quick little
puffs from the copper-coloured face.

230 CONSECRATED GROUND

"Your God cannot speak," said Suggemah
stolidly, "but I hear my Manitou in the wind
and the water. Shall I leave a god who has a
voice for one that is silent ? " And that was how
it always ended.

As for the rest, Suggemah opened himself to
Jamie, till the lad read in him the inherited forest
wisdom of the ages. When the snows came, the
two went oft together for days, and the lad saw
exhibited all the marvellous unwritten skill of the
red man in the wilderness. But it is particularly
of Jamie's last day at Fort Churchill, the first
day of the new year, that you must read.

How it happened, Suggemah could never tell,
because he did not see it. Jamie was shooting
ptarmigan with Macdougall's muzzle loader, his
freckled cheek laid close against the gun stock,
his grey eye glancing sharply along the brown
barrel. Suddenly there was a report so strangely
unlike the sound of Macdougall's gun that
Suggemah came running across the ridge. Face
down on the snow stretched Jamie, and beside him
the muzzle loader, with shattered breech.

For a day and a night he lay babbling, unrespon-

CONSECRATED GROUND 231

sive to all that Macdougall or Suggemah could do.
As the end drew near he talked of many things,
talked ceaselessly in a thin, cracked, high-pitched
voice. Just before the very end he grew strangely
quiet and looked up with one parting flicker of
reason. His mind had tottered back to Mussel-
burgh, to the day he had given Selkirk's letter
to his mother. " Hae ye ony consecrated ground
here ? " he whispered painfully.

"Not here, laddie, at York Factory, but not
here," whispered back Macdougall.

" Wull-ye-bury-me- there ?" He forced it out
with difficulty for things were growing dark again.
"I promised ma mither."

For an instant Macdougall hesitated. To York
Factory was one hundred and sixty miles across
the Bay ice. Jamie caught his indecision and an
extremity of pleading rushed into his eyes.
"Promise," he said weakly, "promise, for ma
mither."

"I promise, laddie, I promise," replied the factor
firmly. "Sleep, laddie, sleep." Then Jamie
turned on his side, smiled happily, and the rest
was silence.

CONSECRATED GROUND

The York Factory trail follows the shore forty
miles to Cape Churchill and swings with it due
south for another hundred and twenty. Suggemah
called it four days with fair going, and for the
first day he broke trail. After him came a dog
team with sleeping bags and provisions, then
another toboggan with the rigid body of Jamie.
The weather was clear and hard. On their right
lifted the stark hills that rimmed this section of
the great Bay, while, beyond, the wind-whipped
ice widened into the speechless north. In these
latitudes, in the winter, words are few. At four
o'clock the little caravan turned landward for the
night's shelter. At five camp was made in the
lee of a titanic fragment of the overhanging
bluff. A hundred yards away, higher up on
the gaunt hillside, rested the shapeless form on
the toboggan.

The night fell black and cheerless. A wind
whined out of the north. . It picked up little rifts
and flurries of snow and drove them dancing
southwards like wraiths in the gloom. The dogs
curled tighter in the circular beds that ere morning
would sink into pits with the warmth of their

CONSECRATED GROUND 233

sturdy bodies. Close beside the red embers of
the fire were the sleeping bags of Macdougall and
Suggemah. Within them slumbered those weary
with the weight of the trail.

One hour, two hours, passed. A dog's forehead
wrinkled and a pair of black ears twitched sharply
erect. Then the grey head lifted, the wolfish
eyes blinked, and the nostrils ' quivered and ex-
panded. Sleep had vanished with a sense of
something strange. In another instant his muzzle
went up, his jaw dropped^showing its white fangs,
and there thrilled out one long desolate howl into
the night, the howl of fear and terror. On the
instant seven other fierce protests joined the
clamour, and the air was split with an inferno of
sound.

The sleeping bags stirred, and from them two
faces stared toward the dogs. Macdougall's arm
shot out and his grip closed on the rifle that lay
beside him. Then, suddenly, the sound ceased and
dropped into an abyss of silence, in which he
could hear the dogs panting. Through a hollow
in the wind came a cry. It thrilled out with a
wild appeal of one in mortal agony, who flings his

234 CONSECRATED GROUND

last breath into a piteous scream for help. It
was the voice of a man, yet not of a man. It was
human, but it came from where no man was.
Macdougall felt his heart contract, and prickly
fear ran over his skin. Again it rose straight
from the darkness, where the toboggan rested
beneath its motionless freight. "Help, help."
In hoarse horror it assailed him out of the gloom.

The rifle shook in MacdougalFs hands, but he
crawled out of his fur robes. Suggemah had
turned a ghastly pallid yellow, but he, too, rose,
and followed, with his gun stock at half shoulder
height, its muzzle pitched forward and his finger
on the trigger.

The factor's knees knocked as he moved slowly
through the deep snow. Then out of the gloom
ahead came a sound of soft large movements and
scuffling. He drew a little nearer. The barrel
of his rifle described uncertain little circles, but
he held it as steadily as might be toward the
sound. In another moment something large and
shapeless rose in front and two great arms thrust
out toward him. On the instant Suggemah fired
from behind him. There came back a choking

CONSECRATED GROUND 235

cough and at that moment the moon slid from
the shroud of clouds that had enveloped it.

In the half light a great she-bear wallowed in
the snow, and, where it rolled, crimson patches lay
dark. Close beside was the toboggan, overturned.
Beneath it, the body of Jamie lay twisted and
distorted. One arm was extended, torn from its
swathing, and the stiff white fingers curled inward
toward the rigid palm. His face was bare, his
mouth was open as if for speech, and on the dead
face was frozen an agony of fear.

The great beast choked its life out in a red
flood. The moonlight came clear and Macdougall,
whose features had grown suddenly old and grey,
stood peering down at the still face. Then he
turned to Suggemah, and his voice shook, " Who
called?"

But Suggemah only rolled his black eyes from
Jamie to the bear, from the bear to factor, till
the whites of them shone oily and lustrous.

" Who called ? " said Macdougall again. His
tone was pitched high in a whimpering quaver ;
he had just met with fear for the first time.

Suggemah shook his head. There were tales

236 CONSECRATED GROUND

abroad of a Thing that walked by night on the
shores of the Bay, a Thing that no man might
meet and live. Perhaps — he stooped over Jamie,
delicately replaced the torn wrappings and laid
the out-stretched arm straight again. "I do not
know," he said simply. " Now I wait here."

Morning came with leaden feet and again the
dog train furrowed its way southward. Behind
them the wind smoothed out their tracks as the
water closes in to obliterate the wake of a ship.
So passed the day in silence and wonderings of
what the night would bring. But on that night
and the next there came no message from the
dead, and then there was but one day's journey
left to consecrated ground.

There is an ominous hour that heralds the
dawn. Macdougall shivered beneath the weight
of it as he lay sleepless with burning eyes. His
brain had turned in on itself with vain imaginings.
In these great spaces the mind of man is very
naked. There is nothing to cloak it from the
cycle of the mysterious processes of nature, for
not only is life itself primal, but death tramps
the trail till his face is familiar from many en-

CONSECRATED GROUND

counters. Now, however, Macdougall felt that
something that lay between himself and the world
of ghosts had been ripped away, and he could
almost put out his hand in the dark and touch that
which was not of earth.

In that hour it came again, the ghostly un-
earthly wail for help, but this time wilder, more
agonized than before. He knew it was coming, a
sharp shrinking .of his spirit warned his body to
summon all its powers in the darkness. But his
heavy limbs revolted from their duty. His heart
moved on, but behind dragged that physical part
of him which was riven with unutterable horror.
Strive as he would he could only crawl toward the
sound. Then past him glided Suggemah, very
smoothly, very swiftly. The Indian's eyes were
flashing, he seemed animated by some superb
infusion of courage.

His figure vanished into the scant timber where
rested the toboggan. A sound of locking jaws
and tearing of cloth made Macdougall feel suddenly
sick. Then the sharp crack of a rifle, and silence,
broken only by the snapping of twigs as something
raced inland through the underbrush.

238 CONSECRATED GROUND

When Macdougall reached him, Suggemah was
stooping over the body. Again it wore that
agony of fear. " Wolf," he said.

Day broke clear and hard as the two set forth.
There was no need for speech. A dumb blind
burden of oppression had fallen over them. They
could do nothing but tramp doggedly on with
quick glances at the shore line, where the hills
were already smoothing out toward York Factory.
Through the brain of each moved a dead wonder-
ment, enveloping thought and spirit alike in a
choking mystifying fog. It was hard to breathe.
It seemed astonishing that they should ever have
been able to laugh — they could never laugh again.

At York Factory was Missionary Simpson,
who wore the only black coat in a hundred
thousand square miles of wilderness. Macdougall
had never thought much of missionaries before,
but he experienced a strange slackness of relief at
the sight of this man of faith. He felt allied at
last to some one who could deal with his own
spiritual extremity.

At sundown on the next day, Simpson stood on
consecrated ground. With him were the two

CONSECRATED GROUND 239

brothers of the trail, and a gathering of silent men
looking wonderingly at everything except that
which lay directly in front of them. Simpson
turned to the magnificent ceremonial with which
the Church of England bids farewell to her
children, and read on with steady voice. Suddenly
Macdougall looked up. "If, after the manner
of men, I have fought with beasts." What did
Simpson mean by that ? He racked himself for an
answer. Again came Simpson's voice. " Behold I
show you a mystery." He waited expectantly, for
mystery had him in its grip. " Forasmuch as ye
know that your labour is not in vain." That was
it — thank God, that was it.

He had a quick sensing as if something that
bound him tight were being cut away. The
strangling weight that had choked him since those
first mysterious cries came through the night was
lifted. He took his first long deep free breath,
and the hot blood went pumping strongly through
him.

The same change came over Suggemah. The
Indian stood erect, his black eyes fixed unswerv-
ingly on the missionary. On his face was written

240 CONSECRATED GROUND

a great resolution. The brief service ended, and
he spoke, quietly, slowly, but with something in
his tones that Macdougall had never heard before.

"I have heard the message of your Manitou.
Four nights ago it came, but I did not under-
stand. Two nights ago it came again, and I began
to understand. My Manitou speaks in the water
and the wind, but yours can give a voice to the
dead. I, Suggemah, am now his servant."

And was it not strange that at that identical
moment, the Bishop, who was having a morning
round at Musselburgh, should pause as he was
settling himself to drive, and remark thoughtfully,
"I say, Selkirk, have you never heard from that
caddy you took to Canada with you ? "

THE BUSH FIRE

Night fell ; there was no sign of rain :
Day broke ; the sweltering day again :
Then, -with the light, a scorching wind
And a grey wall driving close behind ;
A thick grey wall that, mounting, spread
Like a vast blanket overhead.
It blotted out the breathless sky,
Peiling the woods ; where, deep and dry,
Dead brush, dead leaves, dead branches lay
Like tinder strewn. From Jar awav
Through the invisible chaos came
A crackling monotone ofjlame.
Fanned by the torrid blast it swept
Red footed ; onward, upward leapt,
Cleaving with quick and licking tongue
The cloud that o'er its furnace hung.
Then plaintive cries and 'whimperings
Of dumb and terror stricken things,
A stumbling, maimed and blistered tide,
Hunter and hunted side by side ,-
And, winnowing the acrid air,
Lost birds were calling everywhere.

THE BUSH FIRE

JOHN STRONG, C.E., rammed his face up against
the eye piece of his transit, and peered impatiently
down the line. Half a mile away, at the end of
the curve, a man straddled the track, balancing an
iron shod picket. Strong's left arm went out.
The picket wavered.

A faint blue cloud gathered along the right of
way and shifted toward the instrument. "Damn
the smoke," said Strong, and peered again.

The picket had vanished. He was looking into
a nebula of twisting wreaths. They loitered
delicately across the hundred foot lane of clearing,
curled lazily around the raw stumps, and crawled
sleepily along the ragged edge of forest that
marched unbroken for a thousand miles. He
sucked in the acrid smell through expanded nostrils.
"This time — most certainly this time," he said to
himself, picking up the transit and dropping it like
a golf club across his shoulder. The rod man's

243

THE BUSH FIRE

figure jumped up at him through rapidly increasing
fog. "Come on," said Strong, "there's water at
the siding."

An hour later a nervous operator, at flag station
No. 17, was rapping out the call for the divisional
point at Bisco. The wire was bad. Presently
Bisco came on with a peremptory click. " Number-
three-passenger-special-left-nine-fifteen- trestle-on-
fire-mile-eight-one-four-stop-her-Jenkins-Division-
Supt.-repeat."

The operator received with cigarette stained
fingers that trembled over the tilting keys — "Get
busy " — they rapped. Then he looked up and saw
Strong.

The Engineer, leaning over the rough counter,
had got it click by click. Peters knew that,
but shoved out the yellow sheet scrawled
with his own jerky handwriting. He began
to feel unusually lonely, and it was good to
have someone there.

"Where is she now? " said Strong.

Peters turned to his key and tapped out a
call, waited, and called again ; but all he
got was the hum of the rising winds that

THE BUSH FIRE 245

sang through the wires. Bisco was silent.
No. 1 6, the nearest flag station, was inert.
Fifteen gave no answer. "I can't get 'em —
any of 'em," he said desperately. " Say, what
am I going to do? " Peters had a yellow streak
in him. It may have been cigarettes, or perhaps
it was the reflex of the vast loneliness that for
a year had swallowed up his insignificant person.
The impassive Strong suddenly loomed up as
the only way out of a box that in a flash had
grown too tight.

" Batteries ? " queried Strong.

The batteries tested up with a vicious snap.
Peters fingers were very shaky, but he proved
that, absolutely. The office door swung slowly
open, and the pungency of the pale blue
atmosphere sharpened. " Where's your veloci-
pede ? " demanded Strong.

Flag station 17 was at mile 827, sixty miles
from Bisco. No. 3 had left Bisco at 9.15.
She would strike the trestle at 10.30 —
if — he looked at his watch, then at Peters.
" No. 3 has got to be stopped —keep on that
wire, and if you can get the wrecking crew

246 THE BUSH FIRE

up here, get 'em — and lend me a blanket, will
you?"

The railway velocipede as a means of locomotion
follows after the steam shovel and precedes the
Pullman. It has two wheels beneath a wooden
frame on one rail, and an outrigger to another
wheel on the other rail. It is propelled by
man power, and its speed varies with the man.
Strong gripped the lever handles and grinned
at Peters — "There's three feet of water in
the borrow pit round the curve — that is, if
you should happen to want it," he added,
quizzically, and sent the weight of his shoulders
forward.

The Flag Station dropped behind, the velocipede
rattled over the switch points, and Strong breathed
deeply and thought hard. To the southward,
whence came the wind, lay the gold country. A
thousand men were pushing through its tangled
fastness, stripping the deep green moss from
the ribs of earth, and waking mysterious echoes
with the boom of dynamite. Of them was born
the fire. It had crept away beneath dead logs
and dry rootlets and the tinder-like mattress of

THE BUSH FIRE 247

dead leaves, till it revealed the jointed rocks,
seamed and banded with fissures and ribbons
of quartz.

Strong looked southward and set his teeth.
The sky was blurred and overcast with yellowish
grey vapour. The sun hung like a menacing
globe of strange hue, adding its heat to that of
the parched earth. The air was full of small,
sharp smells : the pungency of them cut his
throat and nostrils. Knobs of bare and torrid
granite shouldered out of the tangled bush, and
stood here and there in shaven nakedness along
the right of way. On each side ran the ditch,
with patches of green scum-covered water
shrinking from its baked banks. He could see
a mile, and then not at all. The woods around
him were alive with cracking, as heavy beasts
shouldered along, not yet daring to have the open.

He breathed more and more deeply, sending
all the weight of his great back and stomach
muscles into the long oscillations of the driving
lever. His arms he used not at all, except to
hold on with. At the fourth mile he saw distant
fire — a flicker of pink that licked the belly of

248 THE BUSH FIRE

a grey bank of smoke. At the sixth he was
wet with sweat, that trickled into his eyes and
fought acidly with the smoke. At the big
cut, a moose lumbered down the bank, stopped
to stare at him, and then trotted along in front
of the velocipede, his long flanks plastered with
dried mud and patches of old and matted hair.
At the eighth he struck the crest of the two
per cent, grade that he had, as a maintenance
engineer, cursed fervently for the past month ;
but now the long slope fell away in front, and
the velocipede swayed lightly and giddily over
the crowding rail heads.

At the foot of the grade a hundred cords
of firewood, within throwing distance from a
locomotive tender, were blazing merrily. Beside
it the ties were already smouldering, and the
rails expanding till the fish plates lifted irregularly.
"By God!" said Strong grimly, and shut his
eyes as the heat struck them.

He came out at the other end choking, his
right arm blistered white, his hair singed, and the
leg of his trousers on fire. At the end of the
grade was a swamp, and here for one precious

THE BUSH FIRE 249

moment he stopped to plunge into a slimy patch
of morass. Then he soaked the blanket, and laid
it over his legs.

By mile 815 the woods were ablaze on both
sides, and the right of way was like a terrified
menagerie. Fear of the unknown had spread
abroad in the forest. Hair, fur and feather went
wild. Rabbits with scorched feet ran round in
circles. Partridges shot like bullets through the
long red wall and fell crumpled on the track.
Every pool was trampled to mud with the stamp-
ing of cloven feet. And through it all raced
Strong, his heart pumping and gulping, as if hot
and clotted blood were drowning its labouring
valves.

The wind shifted, hesitated, and dropped.
There was a moment in which everything seemed
to stop and take one long, tremulous breath.
Then the wind came again ; but in that blessed
space the right of way broadened out into a bare
plain, which previous fires had licked clean of
everything that would burn — and on the other
side glinted the trestle. Strong leaned over as
the roar of it came up through his clicking wheels,

250 THE BUSH FIRE

and gazed far down to the creek bed. There
was no fire here — yet.

At the end of the trestle was the big rock cut.
He rattled into it, and as the clamour of his car
clashed back from its jagged sides, he caught the
rumble of No. 3 come wisping along the rails.
He tried to get off, but his muscles refused
obedience. Bone and sinew alike were wedded
to the long sweep of the lever. A black mass
loomed above him, and he heard the locking grip
of brake shoes as the drivers bit. Then, with the
nose of her pilot touching his outrigger, the
locomotive of No. 3 stopped dead, with the
staccato panting of her compressor drowned in
the roar of her lifting safety valve.

Again Strong tried to let go, but his fingers
would not release the handles. Men climbed
down out of the cab, and he sat and stared at
them with smoke-rimmed eyes. His coat hung in
long, smouldering shreds. The blanket had
fallen away, and the white skin of his legs was
blackened and patched with angry stains. The
human smell of him came out strongly with the
taint of scorched hair and clothing. Then he

THE BUSH FIRE 251

suddenly felt sick and shut his eyes ; but the lids
were cracked and seared like acid.

"Is the trestle safe?" he heard someone say.

Strong nodded.

The voice came back like a voice from very far
off — u And the other side ? "

" Hell," whispered Strong, and fainted away.

THE DEFIANCE OF NA-QUAPE

The white man spoke to the red man in the midst of the red man

land,
And said, " I came from you don't know where to help you to

understand,

That the sweep of the lifting prairie that rolls from your dark teepee
With game and feather and hide and fur — they all belong to me."

The red man answered the white man, " I know the north wind's call
And the trail of the trampling buffalo, but I know not you at all :

My father1 s father hunted here, ere myjighting men were young,
Whose knives are sharpened to make reply to a strange and
crooked tongue."

THE DEFIANCE OF NA-QUAPE

THERE was no particular reason why Blantyre
should have left his father's place in Essex, except
that, being a younger son, he was like a fifth
wheel to the parental coach; but the only reason
for his filling a post in the Indian department at
Ottawa was that he had a great name behind him,
and also, perhaps, because the commissioner had
memories of Essex. But Blantyre brought to
Canada such a lofty uninterest in the method by
which most men earn their living that he was
shunted from Ottawa to Winnipeg, and from
Winnipeg to the prairie country south of Regina,
and here his luck changed.

Mackintosh was on his way west to make
treaty with the Fort Pelly Indians — Mackintosh,
who knew more about the prairie men and could
speak more red languages than any one out of the
Hudson's Bay Company. Also Mackintosh knew
more of English history, it being his hobby, than

255

256 THE DEFIANCE OF NA-QUAPE

any man in Canada. So when he heard that a son
of so great a family was within a hundred miles,
he sent for Blantyre. The two struck up a
queer, disjointed friendship. Mackintosh saw
in the shiftless nobleman, the representative,
however unworthy, of ancient glories ; and
Blantyre, having received not a few hard knocks,
had learned to recognize a strong man when he
saw one. Thus the two journeyed west in
official ease and comfort. Then the unexpected
happened ; and, one evening, the Scotchman
walked into the camp with his four fingers dangling
from the palm of one hand, and a gun with a
shattered breech in the other. When it
was bound up by the Sergeant and Joe
Greensky, the interpreter for Fort Good Hope,
he turned to Blantyre.

"Ye must go on," he said quietly. "I'm
for Regina to get the powder out of me ; but
you're my deputy and the Queen's man. Ye'll
no' force them, ye mind, but ca' canny, for
they're kittle cattle. I told ye enough before
this, an' it was well that I told ye."

Blantyre stared at him. "But, I say "

THE DEFIANCE OF NA-QUAPE 257

" Ye'll no' say much if ye take my advice.
Go on an' serve your country. Man alive, it's
the chance of your life."

He swung, white-faced, into the saddle, for
fire was shooting up his arm and plucking at
the shoulder sinews. Then, a private behind
him with a pack horse, he rode off for Regina.

Two weeks later, it was told among the Wood
Saulteaux that the servant of the White Queen
was coming to make treaty, and the news ran
till it spread to the camp of Na-quape, the
Wild One, in the Nut Lake country, north-
west of Fort Felly; and when Bel-agisti, the
Left-handed, Na-quape's oldest wife, heard it,
she laughed viciously, and scraped the harder
at a deerskin across her knees.

But Na-quape called council, and, to the
surprise of the elder men, said that, though he
hated the whites, this time he would go to
hear what might be said. Then he painted
his face and trailed across the prairie with his
wise men, O-soop, the Wanderer, and Min-gan,
the Spotted Wolf, and his fifty fighting men
and their women at a labouring and respectful

258 THE DEFIANCE OF NA-QUAPE

distance, to where Blantyre's camp shone white
in the green immensity of the wilderness.

The Sergeant had, so far as he could, taken
Blantyre under a red-coated wing, for had he
not served under an uncle of the great family
in Afghanistan, who rode hard and swore hard
and fought hard, and who had just such a drawl
as that which slipped so languidly through
Blantyre's tawny moustache.

So, when Na-quape arrived, he found the
deputy's tent open, with the deputy sitting at
a folding table in front of it. He found the
three mounted police standing on one side,
with the flag on the other, and, in the rear,
the canvas habitation of a nomadic trader, who
had use for all the treaty money in Blantyre's
sack.

Blantyre saw a straight, immobile, copper-
coloured statue. Around his forehead was a
band of marten fur, from whkh the black,
feather-crowned hair fell away in two long
oiled and shining plaits. Little brass discs
dangled beside his face, and his body was
bright with shirt and leggings of vivid blankets,

THE DEFIANCE OF NA-QUAPE 259

About his neck a skinning knife hung in an
embroidered sheath, and in his belt stuck the
heavy handle of a great buffalo knife with a
ten-inch blade; and last there was the muzzle-
loader, with its barrel sawn off short. Thus, in
freedom, stood Na-quape, and at a wave of his
hand, the fighting men settled behind him in
a semicircle on the grass.

Very slowly he opened the fire bag that had
once been the lower mandible of a crane, and
drew from it steel and flint and touchwood
and tobacco.

" I say," put in Blantyre suddenly.

Na-quape lifted his dark eyes : " When I
am ready I will speak," he said slowly. Then
a fighting man brought and filled the great
soapstone puagun, the pipe with its yard-long
stem and strange, straight bowl, that had been
handed down from father to son for more years
than even the oldest of them knew.

Blantyre moved restlessly while it passed
silently from lip to lip, and opened his eyes
wider, for Na-quape was holding the mouth-
piece towards him.

260 THE DEFIANCE OF NA-QUAPE

The pipe was very old, and, without question,
very dirty; and Blantyre's lips, that clung so
tenaciously to his brier, lifted instinctively. He
could not guess that he was asked to share in a
ceremonial that was pregnant with meaning to
every red man. He only knew that the thing was
to him unspeakably filthy, and, just as he was
about to imperil the life of every white settler in
the country, the Sergeant whispered : " Take it,
sir, for God's sake take it ! "

So the deputy took it and drew a whiff of
acrid smoke, while tense sinews relaxed and
invisible short guns were laid softly down beneath
draped blankets by the silent semicircle on the
grass.

Then Na-quape, speaking to Joe Greensky, held
his luminous gaze on Blantyre, and said : " It is
well that you smoked, but you sent for me as you
send for a dog. You may be a great man from
far off, but am I not a great man in my own
country ? So — speak."

Blantyre began wrong. There was no question
about that, and the Sergeant saw it : " Don't be
foolish," he said petulantly. "I represent the

THE DEFIANCE OF NA-QUAPE 261

great White Queen, whose servants we are. The
land is hers, and "

Na-quape waved a magnificent arm. " You say
this land is hers ? "

Blantyre nodded. He was getting very im-
patient. He was full of ancestral conceptions of
Kafirs and Hindoos, and it did not appear seemly
that this heathen should have so much to say.
He saw no reason to distinguish between brown
and black and red men. He was racially colour
blind.

" Look here, Na-quape, or whatever your name
is," he said sharply : " Either you take treaty or
you don't." Joe Greensky turned to stare at him
round-eyed ; but he blundered on : " If you
take it, you will be well looked after. Money
and reserves of your own, and all that sort of
thing; and if you don't, look out for yourself."

He settled back in his chair angrily and waited
for the interpreter ; but the whole Indian depart-
ment could not have made the French half-breed
render that speech, so he stammered and stuck.
And into the gap came Na-quape, very quiet, very
lofty, but with a thin thread of passion in his voice

THE DEFIANCE OF NA-QUAPE

that ran through the semicircle like quicksilver.
"Am I a child that you speak thus? Who
gave the White Queen this land? My father's
father hunted here, and his father before him."

Then Blantyre, with a dawning comprehension
of what manner of man he addressed, said care-
fully: "The Queen is our mother." And, hesi-
tating a little, and wondering how Mackintosh
would have put it. "She loves you. We are
her messengers, and we obey."

"Are you finished?" answered Na-quape.

"Yes. Speak."

Then Na-quape drew himself up and folded his
arms, and thundered: "My answer is 'No.' I
hate you, and I hate all white men, but you are
safe with the redcoats. If I came to your country
where you were a free man, and said : * I will take
it and give you in return the value of one beaver
skin a year,' what would you say to me ? "

There was a long pause, and the Sergeant
stooped over Blantyre : " Smooth him down, Sir,
smooth him down. There are too few of us
for this game. Say something, quick." But
Blantyre's temper had the better of him, and

THE DEFIANCE OF NA-QUAPE

he got up, facing the hook-nosed, contemptuous
chief. "I'm not here to talk rubbish."

The words snapped out viciously, needing no
interpreter. Na-quape caught them. The fight-
ing men half rose, and old Bel-agisti ran forward
plucking at Na-quape's robe. Blantyre was brave,
there was no question of that, and, oblivious to
Na-quape and his warriors, he added angrily : " I
do not deal with women."

Greensky caught the words and snapped them
over, because he knew that Bel-agisti had cursed
him for a renegade the year before at Fort
Felly.

"You tell me you do not deal with women,"
snarled Na-quape, a and yet you are the messenger
of a C>ueen. You give me crooked words. Here
is my answer." His great buffalo knife flashed
out and up, and Blantyre held his breath. Then
it came down, the point clean through the table.
The short gun clattered to the ground, and
Na-quape held out empty hands : " I will not
take treaty. Now, if you dare, arrest me and
bring me to the redcoats' camp in Regina."

In the tense silence that followed, the two

264 THE DEFIANCE OF NA-QUAPE

stared hard at each other, the nobleman of the
East and this prince of the West, each spurred
on by pride and kinship, and all that had gone
before him. Na-quape's ancestors had roamed
the prairies, knowing no man's law but their
own, a thousand years before Blantyre's pro-
genitors rose from the Saxon ruck and faced
King John at Runnymede. By custom and order
and tribal law and the passage of countless un-
hampered seasons they were free men, more free
than the otter and lynx and buffalo that perished
at their hands, and behind were those ready to
strike at the crooking of a finger.

And opposite was Blantyre, who, conscious of
something that had risen in him for the first time
in all his haphazard life, saw himself for once as
the representative of a conquering race. A slow,
bulldog fury was beginning to burn in the mind
that had so long put aside duty, or any thought
of that noble service by which far ends of the
earth have been administered for centuries by
nameless Englishmen. And, just as the storm
was breaking, the Sergeant edged his way in
between the two, and spoke with the hard-won

THE DEFIANCE OF NA-QUAPE 265

wisdom of the ranks : " Flour, Sir, bacon, sugar.
Give 'em anything, but give 'em something."

Blantyre brought himself up short. He had
forgotten something to the stranger in his house ;
and it was not so much danger which, half guess-
ing, he did not fear, as a sudden shamed sense of
hospitality forgotten. "I say," he drawled, "will
you have some tea? "

Greensky shot the words over. He could say
that with pleasure, and threw in a personal com-
pliment to Na-quape that slipped uncomprehended
past the others, but touched the frowning chief
in the psychological place. Bel-agisti hobbled
back chattering to her women. The red man's
face relaxed, and the glimmer of a smile eased
the angry brows behind him. "But I tell you
I hate you," he said stubbornly, "and shall I eat
with you ? "

"Yes, old man, certainly. Charmed, I'm sure.
Have some tea," replied Blantyre, with a gleam
in his blue eyes. "Too hot to talk about
hating."

Na-quape turned and beckoned. The crescent
of fighting men rolled forward, leaving each his

266 THE DEFIANCE OF NA-QUAPE

short gun glinting in the long grass. Closely
folded blankets were laid aside, and the deputy
saw lean bodies, and caught the play of tireless
sinews that slipped smoothly beneath the copper-
coloured skin. They were men, these savages,
he thought. Then the women came with their
skinning knives and made the feast ready, and,
when Na-quape had eaten, he spoke ; but, this
time, as to a man whose bread he had broken.

As Blantyre listened, he became slowly aware
that he was reading one of the mysteries of the
world, for, far back as nations go, no one of them
but can trace its parentage to some ancient stock,
while this wild man, who talked so proudly, seemed
to be sprung, indeed, from the wild land he trod.
There was a fibre in the blue-eyed Englishman
that answered to this ; and as he listened he
learned, till out of his learning began to grow
that respect shared by all who knew the red
man as he was before he became what his white
brother made him. Blantyre had heard orators,
but he had never before recognized the truth as
he got it from Na-quape. The chief held out the
pipe again: "It is the pipe of Peguis, the Chief

THE DEFIANCE OF NA-QUAPE 267

of Chiefs," he said simply, and this time it did
not seem so dirty to Blantyre.

Then Na-quape rose and held out his hand in
amity. "You say it is too hot for hate, and
perhaps you are right. The winter is coming^
and then it will be too cold for hate. I cannot
eat my words, and I will not take treaty. But
if you come again, I will be here on this day of
the next year, and then we shall talk treaty."

Blantyre felt a hard palm close over his own,
but something rose in his throat, and he could
not speak. Na-quape mounted his horse and
moved majestically into the west; behind him
the fighting men, and behind them trailed the
women. As they came they went, austere and
magnificent. He turned to the Sergeant, who,
with his three privates, was staring after the little
troop. " 'Tendon ! " he rapped out. " Salute ! "

THE YOUNGER SON

" Thy father's name, thy father' s place,

With all I have are thine,
And always 'would I see thy face
Thou eldest son of mine.

For thee, oh son of later birth,

The distant countries lie,
Wherein a man shall prove his worth

Ere he come home to die."

Then sat him down the Jirst-born son,

Upheld his father's hand,
And marked the seasons one by one

Enfold the quiet land.

Tho1 sharp the cup he turned to Jill

It drew not any cry,
From one who halted on the hill,

But came not home to die.

THE YOUNGER SON

I SAW him first when I glanced down through
the fanlight of the cooks' galley — a long, thin,
hollow face, high forehead, and plaintive but
uncomplaining eyes. He walked wraith-like
through the steam, giving me a curious impression
of detachment from arms and body. These
moved silently and invisibly in the vapours that
rose from a regiment of simmering pots and
cauldrons — and above them apparently floated
the face. Something drew his gaze to mine and
held it there; and instantly I became aware that
we were conversing — not audibly, but with a
direct confident exchange that needed no language
to express it. He began it after a long, thought-
ful stare, during which his invisible hands were
mechanically stirring something savoury, but
submerged. "You quite understand, don't you?
I can see that you do. I've no business to be
here. It would be ridiculous, if it were not "

871

THE YOUNGER SON

The thread broke off with a sudden projection of
himself, an utter casting of his whole individuality
on my intuition.

Thank God ! — I did understand, and flashed
the assurance back to him. He caught it deftly,
moved a little to let another cook crowd past
between himself and the dish-rack, then helio-
graphed me again: — "Of course, it's just as you
like, but if you are on deck to-night I would like
to speak. One doesn't get the chance very often,
and I've got to get on with this rotten show now."

I took a strong liking to him for that — this
delicate head poised in a well-bred aloofness, yet
not a whit divorced from the pans and kettles
beneath : so I moved away contentedly, lest
anything lingering and unsolicited should imperil
this entente, this subtle bridging of the gulf
between the cooks' galley and the promenade
deck.

For the rest of the afternoon we ploughed
gloriously up Lake Superior, till the shores melted
into indistinction on either side, and night dropped
over the ship. There is little twilight in Canada.
Day ends rather with an abrupt transition, a quick

THE YOUNGER SON

encounter of light and darkness, succeeded by an
opaque luminosity in which one can see for long
distances, and in which light itself seems to be
conquered but not altogether banished. And it
was in this chiaroscuro that his figure came silently
across the deserted deck, and dropped into a chair
beside me.

There fell a long silence, in which he mechani-
cally picked a cigarette from my proffered case,
and tapped it gently on the rail. He seemed to
have drifted across my horizon, and now to have
swerved and headed toward me, till he loomed
up sharply and directly ahead. And I knew that
there was that in myself which waited for him
with anticipatory recognition.

It struck me, first of all, that he talked without
cynicism or bitterness. The long, smooth jet of
grey smoke slipping from his lips was no smoother
than his even speech. It was not till the cabin-
door swung open, and a glare of light momentarily
flooded the deck, that I saw his face clearly,
redeemed from the greasy vapours of the galley.
Then, everything was very plain. The hollow
cheek, doubly sunken beneath the cheek bone,

£74 THE YOUNGER SON

the supernormal brightness of the slightly pro-
truding eyes, the prominence of neck sinews, and
the lean caverns in the neck itself — all told but
one story. " It's a jolly old place," he was saying,
"particularly the gardens. And when I was a
youngster we used to shoot rabbits with a rook
rifle from the billiard-room window. The only
trouble was the moles under the lawn — one never
knew where the little beggars were going to
push up. And then I got my ferrets. I say!
what school are you ? "

"Loretto — but I'm a Canadian."

" Oh ! I thought you were English. I'm
Uppingham — we used to play you at cricket."
He wandered back to his father's place in Kent.
" My brother's in the Service. That was a pretty
stiff pull, so I couldn't go up to Oxford. Next
year, one of my sisters was presented, and then
the other one, and the Governor never quite
caught up. You see, he only has fifteen hundred
a year. I would have been perfectly satisfied to
stay at home, because I wasn't very fit, but the
Governor used to send Dick a hundred a quarter,
and so "

THE YOUNGER SON 275

The delicate soul of him baulked at the rest of
it. I passed over my cigarettes, and presently
the thin voice trailed on, beneath the booming
plunge of the black marble wave that fell away
under our vessel's crowding cut-water : — " He
was really awfully decent. He gave me forty
pounds and a ripping camera, and they all came
up to town to see me off. We dined at the old
Cri., and then went to the Palace to see Dan
Leno."

"How long have you been in Canada? " I put
it as gently as I could, but with inward choking
and a rising gorge.

" About eighteen months. I got a warehouse
job in Montreal, but the work was too heavy.
There was a lot of lifting, and my wind gave
out. I had the same trouble at Uppingham.
Could never do more than the hundred, or a
quarter at most. I got seedy at Montreal. My
lung played out, and the doctor told me to stay
out of doors."

"And this — this — what you are doing now? "

He laughed — and at the sound of it, the tears
crept into my eyes. A mirthless ghost of a laugh

276 THE YOUNGER SON

it was, yet, curiously, just such as one might
expect from the face, that looked so hollow and
evanescent when wiped clean of the grease of
the galley. The warehouse and the dish-rack
had in nowise robbed it of the distinguishable
stamp of centuries of birth and breeding. It
stared at me, furthermore, as if inwardly illuminated
by the light of a lamp that flickered the higher
ere it expired in darkness : and it was this transient
physical quality, no less than his unembittered
spirit, that held me.

"And then I shipped as deck-hand; but that
was a bit too thick, and the cook took me on:
so there you are. I say! I haven't talked to
anyone like this since I left home — do you
mind?"

It was too much! "For God's sake, talk!"
I blurted, "Talk all night, if you will. I'm just
beginning to see things. Do you hear often ? "

" Not very. I'd like to hear every month, but,
of course, I can see it all. Things don't change
much there, you know. Dick's brevetted, and
one of my sisters was married last month. They
sent me the clipping. I thought of trying to get

THE YOUNGER SON 277

over last Christmas, but I know a chap who did
that. He dropped in on his people unexpectedly,
but it didn't come off very well. You see, they
didn't expect him, and it rather upset their
arrangements. He was a good deal cut up about
it, and came back at once."

I was full of sudden and savage promptings.
"Do they know about your lung?" I asked,
brutally.

But Deane did not answer. Instead, he raised
a long, attenuated hand, and pointed over the
starboard quarter. The great red globe of the
moon was just swinging into sight up and out
of the silver rimmed horizon. We watched
silently, staring along the brilliant pathway of
gently heaving swells that stretched eastward
from our milky wake. Save for the steady pulse
of the engines, and the perceptible lift of our
throbbing screw, we were utterly alone. Four
thousand miles on the other side of the moon,
was that England that had spewed forth her
younger son. That was in his mind too — it was
legible in the wistful eyes. But it was his — their
affair. I felt helpless to wage war on a condition

278 THE YOUNGER SON

and ancient precepts. I was robbed of my arms
by Deane's impersonality — a fine, delicate thing
that said very clearly that though he was glad
to sit and talk about it, this was, after all, a
matter that concerned only his people and
himself.

I could quite distinctly hear him breathing, with
quick, irregular, little indrawings between parted
lips. He sat soundless and motionless, apparently
indifferent to the cold air which, even in mid-
summer, overlies the icy depths of this inland
ocean. And then I grasped at that which must
have lain behind all his magnificent nerve and
poise. "Look here! you can't stay here — you
simply can't. Let me get you out of it."

"Do you think it's worth while — now," he
added, staring at me with curious eyes, full of
premonitory understanding.

This palpable comprehension made it hard to
answer. It was like a derelict, with decks awash,
questioning the value of its own rescue by a well-
found and friendly ship. No man could look at
Deane and give him more than a year to live;
but I revolted at the thought of that year in a

THE YOUNGER SON 279

cook's galley. "Can you draw?" I hazarded,
thinking of his long, thin, fingers.

" A little," he deprecated, "but not well enough
to be of use to anyone."

"I have a friend — an architect," I lied brazenly
and joyfully, " who wants an office man — wants
him at once. Will you try it?"

He walked over to the rail and began to cough —
horribly; his whole frame shook with it. Then
he came back, a little unsteadily, and stood looking
down at me with just that attitude of polite detach-
ment that the Sphere and the London News bestow
upon their well-bred Englishmen — an attitude
unapproached by any but the pure Saxon. "Do
you mean that — really?"

"My dear chap, I mean it so much that if you
will meet me in Toronto this day week, the whole
affair will be settled in five minutes."

I shall never be able to quite describe his face
at that moment. There was relief in it — enormous,
yet potently restrained. I suppose the unexpected
contact with my own certitude stiffened him, for
he straightened up, and his narrow shoulders went
back squarely. Behind this was something both

280 THE YOUNGER SON

memorial and prophetic. I was in touch with
his uncomplaining soul, but there were depths in
it which he guarded jealously. It was only a part
of him that I could help. My hand closed over
his own, and I tried to infuse into my grasp what
I could of strength and encouragement. Words
were futile ; but I shall always remember the
feel of his thin, cold grip. Then, as quietly
as he came, he slipped off to some remote
shelf, that was called a bed, in the bowels of
the ship.

1 had no difficulty in converting Cooper, and in
a week's time installed Deane in front of a drawing
board, in the office of that most successful architect.
Cooper listened very sympathetically. "A little
more tracing paper destroyed will not be noticed,"
that was the way he met my thanks. He knew,
and smiled when I prophesied progress for Deane,
because he knew that I knew also ; but we formed
a deceptive alliance, and between us bolstered
Deane into a semblance of hope. Then I sug-
gested that he write to his father, and tell him that
things were looking up.

He did write, though what he said I do not

THE YOUNGER SON 281

know; but shortly after I got a letter from
England : —

" THE PRIORY,
" MAIDSTONE, KENT.

"Mv DEAR SIR, — I have just heard from my
son of your recent kindness to him, and write to
thank you for your interest in one who was a
total stranger. It is indeed good of you to take
so much trouble on his behalf. Harry writes that
since the change he thinks he is better. I am
sure that although he is not extremely robust, the
slight pulmonary trouble he at one time experienced
will ultimately be entirely cured by the bracing
climate of Canada. I trust that his progress in
his new position will justify what you have been
kind enough to do for him.

" I am, My dear Sir,

" Yours very truly,

"JOSEPH DEANE."

I was instantly able to visualize Joseph Deane —
an immaculately circumscribed man, the autocrat
of the Priory, divided between a match for his
remaining unappropriated daughter and a life of

THE YOUNGER SON

cold self-sacrifice for Harry in the Guards. As to
Mrs Deane, she appeared one of those negatively
necessary persons who round out an over-modulated
existence with "As you think best, dear." I knew
enough of England to imagine the Priory, its grey
stone boundaries, the velvet smooth lawn, the
peach trees on the south side of the old brick wall,
the (to a Colonial) enervating perfection of it all,
the suggestion that for a thousand years people
had been sitting up at night to produce just such
orderly exclusiveness. And then I came up hard
against young Deane, with his gentle idealism and
silent fortitude, and began to understand the
enormous strength of race and blood and breeding,
and how it was that even bitter memories and
poignant tradition still compelled him to reverence
that which had cast him out.

In the next few months, he made quantities of
drawings and tracings — faithful, pathetic things,
but absolutely unusable to a perfectionist like
Cooper. I used to drop in and see his long face,
with its two hectic spots, bent over the board. I
got closer to him than I expected. He seemed to
be in a sort of breathless calm, that heralded what

THE YOUNGER SON 283

he must have known was coming very swiftly. It
was about that time, shortly before the end, that
he showed me Dick's photograph. Dick was the
only one he said much about, and he spoke with
a curious mixture of affection and family pride,
differentiating himself absolutely. He had letters
from Dick — big, sprawling things — telling him to
buck up and make his blooming fortune.

Soon after this came the breakdown, and I
moved him from his lodgings to my own house;
and it was one night, when I had eased him
through a prolonged fit of coughing, that I begged
him to write home and put the thing exactly as it
stood. He fought it off for days with gentle
doggedness. Without question he had made up
his mind to see it through alone, so far as they
were concerned. Again I felt the existence of
that lonely gulf in which his spirit seemed poised
for flight ; but I fumbled and implored, till he
yielded.

What was in the letter I never knew, but he
leaned more on me than before, as if, almost, by
writing, he had dropped below some standard of
his family code. The intervals between his spasms

284 THE YOUNGER SON

became shorter. He filled them with weak
conversations of England and the English, snatches
of school days, heartbreaking and pointless ram-
blings of a life to which he was no part, but only
a self-admitted encumbrance. He reminded me,
more than anything, of the outcast of the pack —
outcast through feebleness, but following alone,
blindly and worshipping.

Imperative business called me away for a week,
and he died the day before I returned. My man-
servant told me that a letter arrived from England
in my absence, and that Deane looked at it for an
hour before opening it. Then, when he had read
it, he put it under his pillow, and turned his face
to the wall. I found it there, and, for an hour,
pondered with the envelope in my hand. But I
could only conclude that Deane was right. What
lay between those two was none of my affair. I
had had a glimpse of coldness and cruelty, and
something more than a glimpse of pride and
courage. I began to see that the very quality
which carves families to pieces may weld a nation
together with bands of steel. But I wondered,
and have often wondered since, whether the Saxon

THE YOUNGER SON 285

repression of the evidence of personal feeling finds
its vent in waves of national emotion.

Deane died of consumption, but, long before,
his soul had starved to death, lacking its natural
outlet. His vitality was pre-exhausted through
self-repression.

After vainly imagining what effect it would have
at the Priory, I wrote to Joseph Deane. There
was not much to say. The dead boy had left a
trust with me, and I did my best to live up to it.
I said nothing of his hunger for his own kin : it
would have flouted the valiant memory that will
always live.

The answer came very promptly by the first

return mail : —

"THE PRIORY,
" MAIDSTONE, KENT.

" MY DEAR SIR, — Your letter was a great shock
to us all, as we did not realize that Harry vas so
dangerously ill. I had, in fact, believed that the
bracing air of Canada would materially benefit
him. His last communication of some six weeks
ago did not prepare us for this event. Both Mrs
Deane and myself feel that, at the present moment,

286 THE YOUNGER SON

we cannot do more than thank you for your con-
tinued kindness to our son.

" Believe me, My dear Sir,

"Yours very sincerely,

"JOSEPH DEANE.

"N.B. — Kindly return Harry's camera.

"J. D."

THE DEATH SONG OF CHILIQUI

Gone are the old time tribes that peopled a continent over,
Gone as thejlying clouds enshadowed the prairie grass,

And, threading the forest maze, noiv never a brown faced rover,
Follows the deep 'worn trail where the feet of the white men pass.

Still through the silent aisles the ghost of the red man wanders
Slipping from tree to tree with a viewless mocassined tread ;

Still, at the change oj the year, the autumnal foliage squanders
Over his long lost grave the rain of its aureate dead.

Rising like smoke from ajlre and ascending like mist from a river,
Plaintive as echoes that drift from afar away cataract's call,

Thus has he Jled from the haunts that shall know him no longer

for ever,
And sheer from his trampled teepee up-shoulders the factory's wall.

THE DEATH SONG OF CHILIQUI

IT is written in the tales of the tribes, how,
when Kee-cow-ray starved to death in the year
of the big hunger, Chiliqui cared for his mother
till she died of a broken heart with a smile on
her face. It is also told how he appeared among
the Ojibways on Cut Lake, and then wandered
over to the Bloodveins with the news of the
storm that swamped eight and thirty hunters'
canoes on a single night, and left the Ojibway
women mourning. That was the word he brought
to old Peguis, chief of chiefs on Lake Winnipeg ;
and then, with the strange restlessness that
followed him to the grave, he journeyed west
past the grass covered town site of Brandon,
hunting buffalo with Sioux and Blackfeet alike,
getting older and wiser and stronger all the
time. And at Edmonton the call of the bush
country became very loud indeed, so with two
Assiniboine wives he migrated to Lesser Slave

£90 THE DEATH SONG OF CHILIQUI

Lake and thence to the Rockies by way of the
Peace River. Most of this can now be covered
very comfortably in three days ; but Chiliqui had
no reason to hurry, and it took him a matter of
some thirty years.

Now it fell on a day when he was hunting
wild goats on the flanks of the Rockies, that his
wives and horses were swept a thousand feet into
a valley with a rock slide started by the roar of
his own rifle. There was nothing left of his
camp but a gash, sheared clean, through the green
ledge on which it had rested; and he sat day
after day, chin in hand, staring down hill, till,
on the third day, two Stony Indians spied the
grim and motionless figure and stayed to comfort
him.

There was understanding in the comfort. They
cooked and laid food before him, speaking not at
all, and at night threw a blanket over his shoulders,
but touched him not; till on the fourth day the
mourning of Chiliqui ended, and he put out his
hand to eat.

He was now fifty years old, very silent and
very wise ; but with that inward voice still urging

THE DEATH SONG OF CHILIQUI 291

him on, he slipped away from the Stonies, setting
face to the distant and magnetic north, till, one
day peering down into a soft bowl of the hills,
he saw that which whispered that this was the
appointed place.

A hundred feet beneath was a ring of teepees,
and, clustered on the grass sward, a circle of
fighting men, painted, feather-decked and brass
ringed. In the midst of the warriors stood a
medicine man — old, parched and wrinkled ; and
the drone of his words drifted up to Chiliqui as
he stared through a screen of bush.

"The Manitou of the Beavers has answered,
and I heard him. He is sad that our Chief is
dead, but he had need of him in far hunting
grounds. And since there is no man here who
is wise enough and strong enough to lead us,
the Manitou has said this : — ' You will prepare a
teepee, new and very large. In it you will place
skins and robes, also new and perfect, and put
food there and all that a Chief should have. Then
the tribe shall go away for one night only, leaving
all in readiness. No man shall loiter to listen or
spy out, for the Manitou will see him and he

THE DEATH SONG OF CHILIQUI

will die. And the next day you will return and,
lifting the door of the teepee, you will see your
Chief.' I have spoken."

There was silence for a moment, then, with a
rumble of deep voices, the fighting men rose in
a wave of colour. Chiliqui lay motionless, count-
ing the tribe as the warriors called their families
and gave their orders. The young men raised
the new teepee, and from many a fireside came
deerskins, and copper kettles and gaudy blankets
from the Peace River Post, and long shining
buffalo knives — all that a Chief might need. And
when it was done and the door thrown back, the
tribe melted silently into the woods.

Chiliqui held his breath till it was all over, and
descended at sundown swathed in shadows. Burn-
ing his own travel stained attire, he ate and robed
himself anew. Then in the centre of the new
teepee he sat and waited.

At daybreak the woods were full of whispers
and awe. The Beavers were brave, but who
brave enough to face the emissary of the Manitou ;
till the old medicine man came trembling and
looked in. He saw one who seemed indeed a

THE DEATH SONG OF CHILIQUI 293

Chief. A face seamed with the wisdom of many
travels; eyes sombre and full of mysterious things;
a nose hooked like the eagle's ; hair long and
black, shot with grey threads ; a demeanour austere
and wise, but benignant.

"Who are you?" said the medicine man,
quivering at this fulfilment.

"The Manitou sent me and I came. What
need have you of more? " said Chiliqui, sternly.

A hundred hidden Beavers heard, and saw the
medicine man bow before him. A murmur ran
through the underbrush, and in twos and threes
came the tribe, and, seeing Chiliqui, marvelled,
and were content.

Now of the wise rule of the heaven-sent leader,
and the new strength of the tribe, and his last
marriage to Chon-clar, Rainy Weather, is it not
told daily in the hunting camps on the plains of
Ponce-coupe ? But of the issue of that marriage,
namely, Cha-koos, the Comet, and D'Zintoo, the
Rat, it is well to speak

Cha-koos was twenty and D'Zintoo was nineteen
when Mee-nin, the Blueberry, came between them.
She was tall and slight, with big black eyes that

294 THE DEATH SONG OF CHILIQUI

had roved lightly over all the young hunters till
they settled on Cha-koos with love in their glance.
Chiliqui knew this, and his soul was glad in it,
because Cha-koos was the pride of his age, and
Mee-nin was worthy of his eldest son. But
in this he reckoned without the younger, for
D'Zintoo also worshipped her, and laid at her
mother's door the best of his hunting, and
coloured handkerchiefs and silver rings, and all
that could charm the heart of a most marriageable
girl.

To this she was very blind. So it fell on a day
that Cha-koos took her to his teepee, and Chiliqui
gave his last great feast, while D'Zintoo stalked
up and down outside the merrymakers, with murder
in his heart.

"Where is my son?" said Chiliqui, in the
plenitude of his content.

"He walks outside like the bear at night,"
giggled the young girls. "Shall we bring him
in?"

Chiliqui nodded ; and presently D'Zintoo
appeared, like a thunder cloud hurried along by a
burst of sunny weather.

THE DEATH SONG OF CHILIQUI 295

"Will my son eat?" said Chiliqui, looking at
him hard.

D'Zintoo returned the stare, then his eyes
wandered to Cha-koos sitting with his arm around
his bride. Something rose in his throat, and, in
a flash, a buffalo knife whipped out and he
plunged across the teepee. Cha-koos sprang up,
but D'Zintoo never reached him. Quicker than
his fury were the hand and eye of Chiliqui. He
felt himself hurled violently back, the knife ripped
from his grip, and saw his father standing over
him.

In the silence that followed Chiliqui spoke one
word, but, as he spoke, held back the teepee door,
pointing to the forest. "Go," he said, grimly;
and D'Zintoo, the Rat, meeting the gaze that
was bent on him, slunk like a rat into the
woods.

Things went very well then. Mee-nin blossomed
like a flower in the strong brown arms of her
husband, and Chiliqui's cup was full when a man-
child was born to them within the year. But
there came a day when a hunter from Ponce-
coupe told that he had seen a bear trap, that

296 THE DEATH SONG OF CHILIQUI

he knew had been set by none other than
D'Zintoo. At this Chiliqui laughed, but Mee-nin
looked grave and stayed the closer to Cha-koos.

Springtime sat gently on the hills, when there
moved in the breast of Chiliqui that which told
him that his day was near at hand. He was old
and worn with many labours and much sorrow.
Also he was getting blind. So, taking his drum
and climbing painfully to that same ledge from
which he had descended twenty years before, he
sat in the sunshine, singing weakly to himself.
And as he sat, D'Zintoo stalked out of the
woods and lifted the door of the teepee of
Cha-koos.

His brother glanced up from the shadow, and
met the murderous eye. There was no need for
words. So he kissed Mee-nin and his son very
tenderly. "I go to speak to D'Zintoo. Wait
till I come."

At the foot of the ledge where Chiliqui sat,
was a smooth spot of velvet turf, and there the
brothers met, stripped to the waist, their brown
skins oiled and glistening, their moccasined feet
resting lightly on the green sward. There

THE DEATH SONG OF CHILIQUI 297

was no sound except their own deep breath-
ing, and overhead the drone of the departing
Chieftain.

Cha-koos took off his neck-cloth and swung one
end of it to his brother. D'Zintoo crouched and
gripped it. In the right hand of each was a
buffalo knife, ten inches of blade exceeding
sharp and heavy, embedded in a massive bone
handle.

"Now," said D'Zintoo, thickly.

The blades clashed, pressing each against the
other. There was no time to draw back and stab,
for the secret of fighting with buffalo knives is
first to maim and then to kill. Cha-koos leaned
back, feinted, and slashed like lightning at the
sinews of his brother's wrist , but D'Zintoo's arm
fell away like water, and Cha-koos was hard set
to save himself. The neck-cloth ran taut between
them. It meant that only one hand was in action,
but it spelled out the interchange of every savage
impulse. Not for an instant did the beady eyes
desert the defiant gaze that met them. Cross and
parry, thrust and counter, the blades flickered,
darting, twisting, and glancing, but always return-

298 THE DEATH SONG OF CHILIQUI

ing to that silent deadly pressure.

The word ran through the camp. The lighters
were rimmed with a watchful ring of voiceless
Beavers — a rim that broke and scattered, and
closed and formed again with the quick panting
leaps of the brothers. And into the ring ran
Mee-nin with her son in her arms. "Cha-koos!"
she wailed, " Cha-koos ! "

Her husband heard it, and for a fraction of a
second his eyes wavered. D'Zintoo heard it, and
a flash of triumph lit his face, for in that fraction
he reached the sinews in the elbow of his brother.
The arm of Cha-koos dropped and straightened.
His fingers loosened on the handle. But, as they
loosened, he let slip the neck-cloth and with his
left hand caught the great knife. Then, as his
whole breast opened and spurted red beneath the
slashing stroke of D'Zintoo, he thrust outward
and upward, burying his own blade to the hilt.
The last thing he heard on earth was the
choking cough of his brother as they fell
together.

High and shrill rose the cry of Mee-nin. Fling-
ing herself beside Cha-koos, she took his head to

THE DEATH SONG OF CHIUQUI

her breast, babbling unutterable things. His
frame shuddered in her embrace and lay limp, a
bright flood streaming from his gaping chest.
She stared at him fixedly. Then her hand stole
out to where the knife of D'Zintoo lay loosely
in slackened fingers. Springing erect, she stood
a moment facing the silent ring of Beavers, and
with one swift motion tore open her robe and
bared the smooth bronze of her full bosom.
Upward flashed the huge blade, scattering a
dreadful rain of blood in its ascent, ere it struck
downward to a new sheath. "Watch and see
a Beaver woman die." She called it loudly,
defiantly. Then the cold steel sank to her heart,
and she dropped like a stricken deer across the
body of Cha-koos.

Chiliqui leaned over and peered down from his
high ledge. He could see the ring of men, and
could dimly make out something inside the ring.
The fight was grimly silent ; and not till Mee-nin
wailed " Cha-koos," did he break the deep reflec-
tion of his spirit. But that name was a name he
loved, and at the sound of it he called faintly, and
no man looked or heard.

300 THE DEATH SONG OF CHILIQUI

Now that death had come so very swiftly, the
circle of warriors stared at each other and then up
where Chiliqui sat helpless and wondering. It
would take a strong one to tell Chiliqui — and of
them all, who was brave enough ; till out of the
silence rose the ancient medicine man. "I am
going the way that Chiliqui goes," he said,
steadily, " and it may be we shall journey
together.

They watched him climb. They saw his grey
head stoop to that other grey head in a com-
munion of grief and age. They noted the droop-
ing figure reel under the last blow that earth could
inflict on that proud unyielding front. Then the
medicine man moved slowly away and drew his
robe over his face.

The sun stooped to the long magnificent flanks
of the hills. There came over the vast expanse
of earth and sky the ineffable stillness that per-
vades the closing of day in silent places. And
down from the ledge drifted the death song
of Chiliqui, broken with the rumble of his
drum.

THE DEATH SONG OF CHILIQUI 301

/ am Chiliqui, the son of Kee-cow-ray and Warchoola.
The Ojibways know me, and 1 have spoken with

Peguis, Chief of Chiefs.
The Bloodveins remember me, for I have travelled

the warpath with the Sioux.
I have killed with the Blackfeet, and my sons ride

with their hunters, when the buffalo cover the

plains like black moss, and the noise of their

running is like Baim-wawa, the thunder.
1 journeyed west till I came again to the bush

country, and the Manitou of the Beavers knew

me and made ready for me.
There I sought a home and wives ; there I rested

and slept.
I made the tribe strong and wise, finding honour

and peace in the hills.
Now that my sons are dead, I am very weary.
My eyes are like thick glass ; my arms are withered

away ; and I hear only the whisper of men

speaking together.
L am tired of remembering many things, and the

years of my journeying are ended.
I will go now, and when you come to the far hunting

grounds you will find me — Chiliqui.

302 THE DEATH SONG OF CHILIQUI

The weak old voice dwindled as he chanted.
Life was visibly departing from his weather beaten
frame and valiant spirit. Then with one ultimate
flash he smote the drum. Its echoes boomed out
across the voiceless camp, lifting till they were
lost in the austerity of the tilted peaks beyond.
And when the echoes slept, Chiliqui slept with
them.

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TURNBUI.L AND SPEARS.
EDINBURGH

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Sullivan, Alan

The passing of Oul-i-but

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